It is a nice story. It even sounds like fiction to me! That man is an interesting character. Thanks for sharing it.
Very well said Stephen! "obedience to the will of a tyrant". That's pretty good. And the funny thing is that, at the end, that tyrant is actually a human being disguised as a spiritual messenger (.i. e. the Pope or any of those religious leaders).
I use Google Reader and I love it! I daily have more than a 1000 posts to read from several sites (yours included), and of course I cannot read them all, but it keeps me informed about who's posting and about what.
True. We behave pretty much as the people we want to be with... or at least (in my case) we manage to maintain a low profile so people we have to interact with wouldn't harass us. I imagine a lot of stress in being in the middle of a row where everybody is falling and you just don't want to be the one standing because of your fear of others taking offense.
I didn't finish watching it because it was a little bit disturbing to me. Although I think that it could be explained in relation to some sort of empathetic behavior? People, when they're not thinking, behave pretty much as the next person. It seems like they want to be involved no matter how foolish their behavior might look.