<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # So when a mother in a comfortable house in a... > So when a mother in a comfortable house in a comfortable town kills three children under the age of six while the only other adult who carried them is out collecting dinner, the parade begins, and the parade will call it unthinkable for exactly as long as it takes to get through the news cycle. A primatologist sitting in the back of the church would be asking different questions, and none of them would include the word _evil_. What was the helper count? What had happened to the mother's sleep, her rank, her sense of a partner's reliability, her physiological read on whether the next several years of investment could be sustained? How close together were the births? What was the mother's nervous system reporting about her own condition, and how does a brain built to price offspring behave when the price it computes is wrong, or when the enclosure has removed every ancient pressure valve, the alloparents, the grandmother, the co-wives, the forest, and left one animal alone in a house with the entire bill? None of those questions is answered here, and the specific cause in any one case belongs to the people who examined her. But the menu of causes is not a mystery, it is a syllabus, and every item on it is ordinary. {{Civilized people say a mother "snapped" because they need the killing to be a malfunction. The ape has no malfunction. It has a price, and civilization is the only thing that ever raised it.}} Look at the prisons if you doubt it, look at the societies that never installed the price, look at the century's body count, and then look at your own hand holding a spoon of ice cream you decided to eat because it was there and you wanted it and nothing stopped you. {{Human beings do not kill because something has gone wrong with them. They kill because they are the animal that kills, and they refrain because they are the animal that learned to count the cost.}} {{Fortunately, we live in an enclosure where the cost is high. Unfortunately, that is the entire explanation for your neighbor's good behavior.}} **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “So when a mother in a comfortable house in a comfortable town kills three children under the age of six while the only other adult who carried them is out collecting dinner, the parade begins, and the parade will call it unthinkable for exactly as long as it takes to get through the news cycle. A primatologist sitting in the back of the church would be asking different questions, and none of them would include the word evil. What was the helper count? What had happened to the mother's sleep, her rank, her sense of a partner's reliability, her physiological read on whether the next several years of investment could be sustained? How close together were the births? What was the mother's nervous system reporting about her own condition, and how does a brain built to price offspring behave when the price it computes is wrong, or when the enclosure has removed every ancient pressure valve, the alloparents, the grandmother, the co-wives, the forest, and left one animal alone in a house with the entire bill? None of those questions is answered here, and the specific cause in any one case belongs to the people who examined her. But the menu of causes is not a mystery, it is a syllabus, and every item on it is ordinary. Civilized people say a mother "snapped" because they need the killing to be a malfunction. The ape has no malfunction. It has a price, and civilization is the only thing that ever raised it. Look at the prisons if you doubt it, look at the societies that never installed the price, look at the century's body count, and then look at your own hand holding a spoon of ice cream you decided to eat because it was there and you wanted it and nothing stopped you. Human beings do not kill because something has gone wrong with them. They kill because they are the animal that kills, and they refrain because they are the animal that learned to count the cost. Fortunately, we live in an enclosure where the cost is high. Unfortunately, that is the entire explanation for your neighbor's good behavior.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-mother-comfortable-house-neighbors-good-behavior ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->