I was reading a fascinating bit of research over the weekend. It dealt with how pleasure -- an organism's ability to go towards things that reward it somehow and away from things that somehow punish it -- played a role in evolution. This makes complete sense from an evolutionary biology point of view and is something well understood and documented. What made this such a fascinating paper was where the author went with it.
Here's their logic in a nutshell:
- We are wired for pleasure.
- Everyone's just enough different that the pleasure they go after can be unique enough such that in small groups, their individual pleasures become obvious (think going out for drinks with friends and each ordering a different drink).
- Given enough time or a large enough group (and there would be an upper limit on the group size such that group and tribal dynamics don't kick in) these unique quests for individuated pleasures will lead to chaos.
- So it's possible the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was a penchant towards disorder, towards chaos, and had nothing to do with vice or sexual deviancy except that they were manifestations of the disorder. And probably the historians of the day wouldn't grasp the concept of "chaos" in its mathematical meaning, so go with something you can easily point a finger at.
Oh...wait a second...everyone acting as a unified whole? That's a mob, isn't it? Definitely in the third person, never in the first (We were sitting here calmly sipping our drinks when an uncivilized mob roared past.)
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