Blaming victims is not an obscene abberation; it is the norm for our species.

"Sherman, set the Wayback machine."

The above command was commonly heard by anyone who watched Sherman and Mr. Peabody's adventures in time travel as a child.  In this episode we'll be traveling back in time to observe a group of human hunter-gatherers.

Gavin de Becker, author and Cubicle Overlord of his own security firm, Gavin de Becker & Associates wrote, "We may live in the Space Age but we have Stone Age brains."  In the next few paragraphs, I'll be taking his general observation of human behavior and attempting to systematize it a bit.

Everything that living things do, including modern human animals is either a function of ensuring individual survival or that of the species as a whole.  Forming packs and enforcing the Rules of the Pack ensures the survival of the pack, often at the expense of individual safety and survival. 

Human animals share a few characteristics with dogs and chimpanzees.  All three species are violent and predatory, and they all employ the same basic social structure: The Pack.   The basic structure of The Pack is both simple and familiar.  The Alpha Male is at the top, a layer of toadying, sycophantic alpha male wannabes and seemingly empty headed fertile females sits just below Him, often going to extraordinary lengths and presenting laughably implausible arguments (like blaming His victims) to defend His position.  Below them are the numerical majority of pack members, often just hoping to survive by avoiding any appearance of not supporting His position.  These individuals also engage in an awful lot of victim blaming behavior.  Recall from memory the victim blaming behavior blithely displayed in communities like Steubenville and Maryville.  At the very bottom of the pack are individuals who are least powerful, least popular, least wealthy, least well connected and so forth.  These individuals are almost always badly mistreated by those above them.  They learn two important skills from their experiences.  They learn to place little or no value on human life, and they learn to mask even the most vitriolic rage behind the bland smile of a thoroughly cowed and cooperative child.  This is the layer of the pack from which we get men like Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City), Eric Harris (Columbine), Adam Lanza (Newtown), and most of America's serial killers.  Public school teachers bear witness to this behavior on a regular basis.  They're just not allowed to report it to anyone with the power to correct it.

We're not going to talk about that.  Finish your vegetables children.  In the morning we'll pretend this never happened.

This post is about why blaming victims is the norm rather than some perverse aberration of human behavior.  One of my elementary school teachers told me that repetition is a good learning tool.  With that in mind...

Everything that living things do, including modern human animals is either a function of ensuring individual survival or that of the species as a whole.  Forming packs and enforcing the Rules of the Pack ensures the survival of the pack, often at the expense of individual safety and survival.

The principle repeated above applied extremely well when everyone was a hunter-gatherer.  The survival of The Pack was ensured by an arrangement that allowed the alpha male and a few of His toadies to do most of the breeding and by preventing those who were weakest from doing much at all.  This makes perfect sense in a jungle.  And back then, the smallest, weakest humans, no matter how angry they became had limited resources when it came to taking revenge upon The Pack.

That was then.

This is now.

Technology has improved a bit over the years.  Timothy McVeigh built a bomb.  Eric Harris and Adam Lanza used firearms.  And individuals who are smart enough to stay out of the media spotlight have been paying us back with an increasingly sophisticated array of computer viruses for years.

Here's Pia Durkin's homework question for today...

Given your recent decision to blame the victim, Mrs. Maura for His violent behavior, how long will it be before technology allows individuals who were forced to spend their formative years at the bottom of the pack to graduate from computer viruses to real ones.  There won't be any zombie apocalypse, but you can safely bet that your grandchildren, and their children are going to suffer terribly because placing violent males on a pedestal and placing blame for their behavior on the victims is still widely practiced.

Please use complete sentences and correct punctuation, show all work, and reference any source material in your bibliography.

Begin.