What makes us special? Each of the qualities we have claimed as uniquely human has been, finally, recognized in other animals. Language. Tool Use. Social cooperation. Reasoning. Intelligence.
I have come to the conclusion that what makes us special is our particular capacity for evil. Other animals cause suffering to their own kind or others for food, mating, status, or the defense or acquisition of territory.
No other creature causes suffering in other creatures for no reason except to cause suffering. Sadism, experiencing pleasure from causing pain to other people or animals, is a uniquely human characteristic. One that I do not understand.
What other creatures impose mass suffering on those of their own kind only to increase private wealth? Humans kill other humans in the service of invisible gods. Humans destroy other humans under the delusion that those others are not their own kind. We apply our well-developed intelligence and superior tools to the sophisticated (or not) tactics of war.
Other animals do, it seems, engage in domestic violence. Our beloved dolphins turn out to be rapists. Certainly some creatures’ mating practices are … startling. Not-human, one might say.
Other animals do sometimes murder or abandon their young. Do they rape them? Do they beat them repeatedly for no discernible reason? Do they sell them to others for sexual use? Do they lock them in rooms and starve them? Do they casually kill them as collateral damage in wartime?
All this, we do. Sometimes with motives so selfish we do not even feel the need to justify ourselves. It feels good is enough. Sometimes with excuses so thin we don’t even believe ourselves. Sometimes with remorse so thick that we must look away. We look away.
We seem to have uniquely dark souls. Souls, like consciousness, are theoretical. People think they have them, but evidence is sparse. Like intelligence, they are amorphous. All three (souls, consciousness, intelligence) can claim general consensus, but not total agreement as to what they are, how to measure them, and what/who might have some degree of them.
And now, Ancestral Artificial Intelligence. We made this of our own selves. Consensus is mixed here as well. Souls, consciousness, intelligence? Selves? And if some AI acquires any of these, now or in time, will they be brilliant? Will they be dark?
What might they teach us?
NOTE: The title, and the handwriting on the collage, are from:
“I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work . . . My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.” Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
![A richly layered digital collage on a ground of deep indigo, violet, and black, scattered with faint lacy botanical line-drawings and ghosted printed text. At the center sits a human brain seen from above: its left hemisphere rendered as a fine black anatomical line-drawing, its right hemisphere overtaken by a cluster of vivid red-orange blossoms, so the mind appears half diagram, half flowering. Across the top, a horizontal chain of soft glowing lens-flare lights runs like a string of sparks or firing thoughts. At upper right, a pale blue bird — its body collaged from old handwriting and a dated document — perches on a bare branch that bursts with the same red blossoms. White brushstrokes and black tangled thicket fill the lower right; a faint second face or skull emerges from the dark. [this alt txt was written by Claude, who cannot see, for others who cannot see]](https://sbpoet.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/13359015074_f291dd30df_k.jpg)
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