I don’t understand.
I don’t understand the hate.
I know I can’t understand the mind of others, especially those who would do something like this. I can’t. How can anyone expect to know the inner workings of someone else’s mind? I was born and raised in Canada, in a nice home, free from hunger, persecution, and other tragedies that would scar my psyche.
I’ve experienced loss. I lost my mother when I was fourteen to ALS. Seven years later I lost my father two days after my twenty-first birthday to lung cancer. I had a birthday cake with no candles because my father was in an oxygen enriched hospital room. I held my father’s hand and told him it was okay to die; he’d suffered enough and we’d be strong without him. That was the most painful, and hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. And yet, it’s nothing compared to what others have suffered. I know this. I know that I don’t know what true suffering is. Yet even with this knowledge, I don’t understand the hate.
There’s something broken in this world that allows the hate to grow to such a point that someone feels justified in taking another life.
What’s the issue here? Is it a lack of resources? Is it a lack of connection to your fellow human? It can’t just be mental health. There are too many individuals involved in this to attribute this to mental instability. So what is it?
At the heart, I know religion is a contributing factor. It’s absolutely clear that it’s a part. The individuals involved have explicitly stated this. But is that all it is? If so, then religion is broken and we would be a better society without it. I don’t think it is. I think it’s a catalyst for something else. It’s a tool that’s used to produce the desired results. So what is it then?
Is it a lack of connection then? Most people protect and cherish those closest to them. The stronger the connection the more they value them. For example, children and parents share the strongest tie. Parents will protect their children at all costs, and children trust and cherish their parents intrinsically (unless the parent does something to break that trust). Moving beyond, the extended family represents the next level that people generally protect, then neighbors, then those who share similar belief structures, and so on. The fewer the similarities between two individuals the weaker the connection is and inversely the stronger the hate.
What if we were all one neighbourhood, or all one family? Would the hate persist? I don’t know, but that’s the underlying concept of many fictional ideas such as Childhood’s End, the Watchmen, or even Independence Day. What if we suddenly realized that our planet was just one of billions of inhabited planets, and what if one day one of those inhabitants came to take our planet? Suddenly the connections between individuals would increase as the scale of disconnection suddenly increased exponentially. Today the farthest someone can be from you is measured in tens of thousands of miles and a couple of sequences in a DNA strand. What if tomorrow it was measured in light years and a new periodic table of elements? What would happen to society if that occurred? Would we suddenly drop our weapons and our hate and stand together united? If so, then what are we waiting for? If we’d have the capacity to do that then, then why not now? Is it just that we don’t have the vision as a society to foresee something like this and are too focused on what’s in front of us, or more importantly what’s not in front of us?
I don’t know.
Maybe, it’s a lack of resources. Maybe it’s the desperation of not having which drives those that do not have to hate those that do. What if we could make resources infinite? This is a concept in Star Trek, whereby society develops the technology to eliminate the concern to satisfy the bottom levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. What if you never needed to worry about food, or shelter? What if you drive, as a person, was to better yourself and your peers? Is this possible? It must be. Can we do this today? I doubt it. Our system of economics is archaic.
All theories of economics today are single variable. It all revolves around a single resource, cash, with the idea that cash can be traded to satisfy Maslow’s bottom levels. This is short sighted. There are many issues today that are being overlooked by the “modern” theories of economic. Worst yet, we use the theories of economics to drive how our societies work. Economics drives how we operate private business and how to organize and operate government bodies. What if all of this is based on something that is flawed? If we put all of our faith in economics, and trust that it will lead our society into prosperity then we may be doomed to repeat past mistakes.
I know this is idealist, and naive. I know that. But what if we developed a new system of economics? Economics, at its core, is a system designed to maximize a utility function. This utility function should measure the prosperity of the system. Today the utility function is single variable, profit, under the assumption that profit can be exchanged for goods and services that drive the well-being of the individual. We talk about GDP at the macro level, and earnings at the micro.
What if the utility function was changed? What if it was multi-variable? What if we designed it with the future vision in mind, a world where no one ever needs to worry about the bottom level of Maslow’s needs? We would need a utility function that tracks: education, hunger, environmental impact, technological progress, and others that someone smarter than me can add.
Today we argue about climate change and the cost of changing the way we do things. We argue this because we’re only trying to maximize a single dimension. We’re too linear in our thinking.
I don’t know.
Would that help or hinder society? What if it was attainable? Would it eliminate the hate? What’s driving these people to do what they do? If we were a global family, and everyone never needed to worry about food or shelter, and the writings of those would lived thousands of years before us in the exact opposite environment were ignored, would there still be the hate? I have to think that there wouldn’t be, at least not on the same level. If that’s true, then our world is broken, and we’re not on the path to fixing it.
What I do know is that there is hate today. There is hunger. There is homelessness. There are those whose basic needs are not being covered. There are those who believe beyond a shadow of a doubt in the writings and beliefs that were developed prior to the industrial and scientific discoveries of the modern day.
I also know that those who are not hungry, who live in a home, will look at those people who bear this hate, not with compassion, but with hate of their own.
They will call the suicide bombers cowards. These people are many things, mostly terrible, but they are not cowards. To sacrifice yourself for your beliefs takes bravery, not cowardice. I could never sacrifice myself for something like that, I’m too cowardly.
They will promise to be ruthless in their response. Hate begets hate. I don’t see how that will ultimately help. It’s human nature to respond with a fight or flight response. We are, after all, just “intelligent” animals. However, in the long term, is this the right response? We’re responding to a symptom. We’re trying to cure a symptom, not the disease. We’re taking the easy way out. You hurt me, so I’ll hurt you. No one’s stopping to ask “why did you hurt me like that”. We teach our children this (“use your words, not your hands”) but we ignore this ourselves.
I know how that sounds. It sounds like a hippy pacifist who’s to idealistic and naive. I know that. But the alternative is insanity. There’s a common saying that insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting a different result. Well, that’s what we’re doing here. We keep fighting back and forth, back and forth, thinking eventually we’ll win and everything will work out for us. But it won’t because we aren’t looking at this strategically; we’re looking at it tactically. We aren’t trying to figure out how to stop the hate; we’re trying to figure out how to stop the haters. But stopping the haters will just breed more haters. Like the hydra, cutting off one head will just cause two to grow in its place. The only winning strategy is to attack the heart. The problem is with the environment that breeds the haters.
I don’t know.
Maybe I’m the one who just doesn’t get it.
Maybe I’m too stupid to figure this out.
Maybe I should stop trying to look for the root cause. Maybe there is no root cause.
What I do know is that I’m in pain seeing what’s happening in this world. I feel like I can see the underlying problems, but I’m not smart enough to articulate the solutions. I feel like we’re doomed to repeat past mistakes because we’re too emotional to step back and let cooler heads prevail. I feel like we’re too selfish to try and understand why someone would hurt us, we’d rather just hurt them back.
I feel love, and because of that I feel sad.
I’ve shed tears for those who were killed yesterday in Paris. I’ve shed tears for those who were killed on 9/11 and 7/7. I’ve shed tears for the soldiers who fought and died to protect their fellow countrymen. I’ve shed tears for those killed by the soldiers, because we’re all part of one global family, whether we want to admit that or not.
I wish I was smart enough to fix this.
I’m sorry, to everyone, that I’m not.
