So you KNOW that any life form that intentionally makes us "suffer" does so for the motive of "recreation"? You can't imagine a form of life that feeds off emotionally energy the same way a plant does sunlight (or we do food)?Predators in Africa also don't make their prey suffer. They kill it swiftly and for most part painlessly. A lion, a cheetah or a leopard always go for the jugular, while at the same time suffocating their prey with their powerful jaws.
Intelligent beings who make other beings -- and then even more especially, other intelligent beings -- suffer on purpose for the sake of "recreation", not even for survival, that's what makes it perverse in my book.
You KNOW that there are creatures you describe, without the ability for empathy but are motivated to torture us...because that's how they choose to spend their time? It just doesn't make sense to me. Especially in context that you are able to show a lack of empathy toward creatures that seem to have a degree free will on their own, and moral relativity toward their torture.
So I will bring this back toward the topic more, I believe that once I learn of suffering of another living creature, it becomes my responsibility to try to help relieve it. I understand that in this infinite universe, helping one I know of may be "harming" another that I am not. I understand that this is risk in acting the "savior".
I believe that if we can detach emotionally from the beliefs we have about reality, we can analyze these relationships more accurately, and make better decisions. Having an automatic association of "fear" when someone mentions "savior" does not serve us. Whether or not it someone's responsibility to help us if they are equipped and in a position to, I just told you: My very being is to try to take that role any opportunity I get.
What is really going on seems to an avoidance of an aspect of this discussion, and that is the nature/motivation of those that would enslave us. Perhaps if we ever obtained more accurate and less emotional feedback on that, we would be better equipped to avoid it. As long as we hang on to this habit of taking personally that someone/something is doing this to us (keeping us victims with strong and convoluted emotional attachment to the very idea of victimhood), we're never going to get out.
Maybe you are incapable of applying the "as above, so below" connection here, but I will never be able NOT to. Whether or not you are conscious of it, I would think it was "good" if some being prevented the baby cow from being tortured, and it is not that baby calf's responsibility to save itself. Maybe our seemingly greater self-awareness gives us more responsibility in our current situation than the baby cow chained up in the slaughterhouse, but I am just cautioning that it might not be a failing to want or even welcome a "savior" outside of ourselves to help us allieve our suffering.
It IS our responsibility to learn the motives and methods of enslavers, who seem to have the very effective method of posing as "saviors". But it would be wise to imagine/keep in mind that predators of that level of sophistication should be pretty capable of adjusting their tactics as their "prey" learns to defend against them.
But again, my point is we can never even get to this level of thinking until we drop all our bad/old ideas and especially the emotional associations to the predator-prey relationship. In the grand scheme, we are responsible, if we suppose evolution and survival of the fittest and all that...but it seems that sovereign critical-thinking humans are an endangered species...where our fate seems less likely to be that of the dinosaurs than it does the fate of whatever cows were before we starting domesticating them.
There's a lot of dynamics at play here: I wanted to be freed from the cultural programming that prevents independent, critical thought. Bringing carnivorous lizards into the equation is a different matter, I brought my perspective in there not for the fear-of-being-food angle, but to analyze our relationship with energy exchanges in a more general sense. If I saw humans getting devoured, it might be a different story. I only see humans being enslaved.