[poop MANIAC(fecal frenzy!!!!!!!!]

Society. All organisms live in one, from the mircrobes floating in the anarchy of a drop of pond water, to the crows forming kin tribes to claim valuable plots of landfills, to the ants who develop complex, egalitarian sororities from which they can organize the slaughter of ants who have a slightly different head shape. Why, even we humans live in a society, taking briefcases miles across the land to change values in Excel spreadsheets as a means of obtaining the intermediary means to obtain food. In any society there are rules; the big eats the small, the us eats the them, the car stays on the road, etc. In any society, the violation of these rules results in retaliation from the society at large. In human society, that retaliation is an almost exclusively punitive affair, an effort on the system's part; it is meant to safeguard said society from crumbling apart, for a system can only exist in theory if its rules are not followed in practice. Punishment is meant to be a deterrent for prospective deviants, and a correctional affair for active ones.

Humans are a volatile, intelligent animal. Intelligent animals, as a matter of instinct, are driven to push and prod at the rules under which they find themselves, to look for shortcuts and ways to circumnavigate their limitations, even if (sometimes especially if) pushing those boundaries doesn't have any distinct or meaningful benefit. Humanity, as a whole, has obtained its place of preeminence, because this drive to defeat the system, this underlying instinct to overcome restriction and chase its own agenda, is such a powerful force inside of each and every individual among us. It is our universal quality that allows us to adapt, to create and to innovate.

Humans also possess the ability to contextualize; we may take stimuli and compare them to a previous body of experience, a great bubbling cauldron of biopsychosociological variables which can make sense from nonsense, and just as much vice versa. What may seem like a harmless, absurd image edit of a public persona on a social media may be in reality a malicious, hateful attack of targeted harassment to another. It takes a great deal of empathy to realize that not everyone comes from the same emotional and sociocultural background, and even moreso to overcome that knowledge and view actions from another person's point of view. Empathy is a powerful tool of the social animal, something which allows them to assimilate and accommodate information with a high level of consideration for context. In more intelligent social animals, that context can go further than the obvious to consider the individual experience of the kin creature before it.

What we have here is a crisis of conscience. Shall we decide to punish our brother randy here further for simply being too human, for prodding the structure in which he lived out of that innate sense of primate curiosity? Or shall we satiate society's need for revenge, safeguard its mechanisms and health, protecting it from the humanity of its constituents which is the system's biggest threat? What is more important, that one man has learned from his self-destructive sense of curiosity, or that the monolith of the system remain untouched, sacred, and intact?

I know what I, as an individual, think. I think a +1 to unban randy. What does our society think?