I think all violence relies, if not stems from, the ability to perceive other people as different - the inability to view the acted upon as a living being that behaves and thinks according to a rationality not dissimilar, perhaps even identical to the actor.
Unless you're emotionally unstable to the point of suicide, which I'd argue is a different problem, and one less worth our anger than our sympathy, the problem that causes one to lash out in violence, be it a fist fight on a school bus or a massacre, is the lack of identification with what you believe about another person. When you stop - or never do identify with another person, when you stop seeing them as what you know of as human, as alive, disgust, anger, hatred, they almost flow naturally.
This is us.
Really, really, think about that. This is every. Single. One. Of. Us.
Across that 8,000 mile range, that circle that you can hold a thumb a foot in front of your face and blot out, against the unintelligibly vast backdrop of the universe, lives over seven billion human beings and an uncountable number of other life forms. If you travel another Earth diameter, if you travel twenty, thirty, ten thousand times that, apart from those few hostile worlds that accompany us in our star's slow orbit around the galaxy, you will find nothing larger than an asteroid. Nothing more significant than rocks and dust.
Here we are on this singular, stupid little planet, alone in a way few of us can even begin to imagine, and we hate ourselves. We are violent with ourselves, we hurt and bend and murder ourselves, and can't you see? It is just us. Perhaps it's the isolation. We have no one to talk to, no one to give us perspective how wildly different things can be, and so the entire range of human emotion bursting from billions and billions of human lives must rage across this little blue thing, no bigger than your thumb.
But then there's this.
And this.
And suddenly this
seems like such a strange place.
But it's not. Everyone you ever meet is genetically identical, save for a fraction of a percent. Everyone you ever meet, talk to, think about, everyone you care about, love, hate, shag, fight, live with, cry with, touch or avoid, and all the other billions, exist on that same blue thing spinning around in the same soul penetratingly immense void.
We are all so similar, so identical. We are similar enough that we can hate each other, and for deep ideological reasons too, but it all stems from the fear of something that is not the same, fear of the other, fear of something different from you. From me. From us.
We're not different from us.
I think, I genuinely believe, that the only long term counter, the only effective thing we can do to keep all of us with these hundreds of thousands of years of survival instincts, keep us from tearing each other apart as we slowly, but more and more rapidly begin to occupy each other's space and thoughts and emotions, is to understand each other.
We live in a universe where entire galaxies, teeming with millions and billions of stars and whole solar systems like our own, can be ripped apart, annihilated, but somehow, somehow we think that us, us on this little blue thing that something will save us from ourselves.
We evolved to survive in a world where what we did didn't impact people even ten miles away.
We've changed that world, and we need to change with it.
Go outside and talk to someone. Go outside and make someone happy. Make someone understand that this stupid planet doesn't have to feel so alone.
Edited by ticklemyiguana, 14 November 2015 - 12:36 PM.
Sign In
Create Account
Back to top
