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“They hurry like savages to get aboard an iron train/And though it’s smoky and crowded they’re too civilized to complain.”
“Bongo, Bongo, Bongo”, Danny Kaye
The difference between the civilized man and the savage is that the civilized man follows the rules and the savage does not. A civilized man is quite capable of killing one, a hundred or even a million, so long as he is first outfitted with a uniform and a set of regulations telling him when and where to kill. A savage kills as he lives, without the need for rules and regulations. The civilized man is bound by interdependent social compacts that control his survival. The savage does not depend on a social compact for his survival. He depends on himself. Even when his survival derives from the same system as that of the civilized man, he feels no sense of obligation toward that system. He exploits it, the way that he would exploit a honeycomb in the forest or kill the last mammoth without worrying what will happen when it is gone.
The modern civilized man with his giant and tiny screens full of information that tell him not only who won and who lost, and make him laugh and cry, but also update him on the latest social mores so that he can maintain his civilized status by staying in step with the march of progress, has learned to live by the rules. More than that he has learned to believe in the rules. The rules feed him and move him up the ladder where he will be able to buy more giant and tiny screens to stay in step with civilization.
The savage advances much more slowly up the ladder, even when he lives next door to the civilized man, but this is of little concern to him. The civilized man is concerned with advancement while the savage is concerned with sensation. The civilized man wants to better himself. The savage only wants to be himself. For the civilized man there is only the past and the future, but no present, but for the savage there is hardly any past and no future… only the eternal carpe diem moment of the present.
The civilized man builds trains, roads, telegraph poles, skyscrapers, fiber optic lines, satellites and organizations to link together and control his civilization. Faster communications and transportation make it possible to link together larger areas, economically and politically. Civilization expands and grows denser at its centers and increasing amounts of resources are diverted from the tasks of progress to the chores of administering impossibly large territories.