We become who we are early.
We spend our lives in a narrow spectrum bordering that way of being.
We categorize what is & what is not us.
What’s "wrong", what’s different & 'other'.
Who are the enemies of us?
All these viewpoints from our center of being relate directly to who we are, not who they are.
Those ‘they’ are all around us. Some of them we usually love, our parents, our fellow siblings, our friends. Others we tolerate as long as they reflect us and our feelings of right and wrong in some way. Those who don’t we avoid, ignore, loathe and perhaps fight.
What of those ‘they’, the ones that are not us? How did they become them?
In exactly the same manner we became we... but through a different avenue of other influences.
We consider ourselves good. We consider them bad.
But none of us have a choice. We come with what we have. We go through what we go through.
Some of us create great good, some only moderate good. Some create almost nothing. Others create bad effects, commit crimes, hurt people, steal, rape, murder. Why the difference? What makes us good? What makes them bad?
Nothing comes from nothing.
No one is born bad, or if they are you must look to some past life for the answer to the questions above.
Can a baby be bad? Some parents who are pulling their hair out because they can’t get a baby to stop crying might say so. But that baby is simply reacting to what it’s feeling. We can’t tell what it’s feeling and why much of the time. That’s all that’s happening.
Most of us don’t understand why people rob, rape, hurt and murder others. We don’t know what they’re feeling. We don’t know why someone would be so different from us that they could do those things. Like the parents who have no ability to tell what’s up with the incessantly crying baby we simply find that behavior impossible to understand.
What becomes right to a person clearly varies. The “bad” person doesn’t do bad things because he or she simply likes to do things that hurts others. Not unless they have a condition which creates an overwhelming urge to do so such as those who are sadists or sociopaths. There was no choice involved. They didn’t flick a switch to choose to be sadists or sociopaths.
We didn’t choose to be good, no matter what you think. If you are indeed a good person you merely avoided or survived things that others who we call “bad” did not. As is said, to understand someone you’d have to stand in his or her shoes. But this is impossible. You would have had to go through the same things as them to truly be like them even for a moment.
We all tend to think everyone thinks like us and sees things as we do.
They don’t. None of us think precisely alike. None of us act precisely alike. We are all different... but it is comfortable and creates less confusion in our minds if we conceive that more or less everyone, or at least the majority think and act like us.
Being in the majority of ‘good people’ is important to most of us. In this condition we can reflect on those others who do bad things somewhat in the role of judges. For we are the good. And they are the bad. And this makes things simple, it assures us of our higher status, of our majority status and holds down any neurotic doubts we may feel from time to time concerning things about ourselves we feel somewhat ashamed of or wish were otherwise.
We have all done shameful things. None of us have reached our full potential. None of us have been totally good. But we put ourselves somewhere on the spectrum between good and “evil”. And most of us choose to believe we are basically good.
Those we call ‘bad’ also believe the things they are doing are good, good for them or those who see things as they do. They don’t understand the mentality of the ‘good’ as we don’t understand their mentality, that of the ‘bad’. How could they? How could we? All the experiences that made us and that made them are far away in the past, back down wholly separate corridors of crime.
How could someone who grew up with gentle, caring parents in a leafy suburb who went to schools, and college and university where no or few bullies or overbearing teachers caused them great difficulties, those who had pretty good friends and enough affluence behind them understand those who grew up in some sink estate where you either joined a gang or were the victim of one or more and where your life chances were minimal, where possibly your parents were alcoholic or drug abusers who used violence on you, had low-ability teachers who had given up on the “monsters” in their classes?
It’s impossible no matter how empathic you are. If you have come through a relatively easy route you will never truly be able to understand those who havn’t. Not in a million years.
Most people simply give up trying or find it most comfortable to sneer at them, certainly fear them, recommend locking them up, perhaps executing them. They are a danger to good folk. They ruin things for the majority. They cause mischief, they rob people, they rape, sell drugs, they hurt others with fists, knives and guns. They murder. get them gone or out of my sight.
Yet they are not guilty. Not in any true sense. None of them chose to be as they are. Not one of them. Not one of us did either. They are as they have become as are we. No one flicks a switch and chooses to be good or bad. We emerge from a time of being sponges soaking in influences and experience, open books to be written upon, empty vessels of innocence that are unformed and molded by all we see, hear and experience. This forms us... for good or ill. From the point of our formation onward we find it almost impossible to change because our world view is by and large fixed with us. Of course we can move those margins to our view a little as time goes by, our viewpoints can become somewhat more sophisticated... but that inner core? Forget it.
And what does all this lead to?
The world as it is today.
We are a species tearing ourselves apart due to our differences and our propensity to exasperate those differences, to criticize and fail to even try to understand. We are full of reasons why we are good and they, whoever they are, are bad. We cuss and swear, we demonize, we hate, we fear, we want something done. Something done about those others who are acting badly, trying to destroy us or our systems, our peace, stability and right to be respected as good.
We live on a planet at war. Or better said we are a species living on a lonely planet and we are constantly at war with ourselves due to our differences. When everyone wants what they want no one gets what they want. And that’s where we are now. We all feel entitled. And we all want those others inhibiting our entitlement stopped.
Robert Owen: “All the world is queer save thee and me and even thou art a little queer.”
A species at war with itself is not going to survive very long, not in a state of happiness at least.
If we refuse to understand what is alien to us. If we refuse to do anything in regard to “enemies” but attempt to jail or destroy them what hope is there for us? Only some form of connection that brings some modicum of understanding ever resolves anything. Refusal to do so is just more cutting off our noses to spite our faces.
We are all both guilty and innocent to some degree. Though I’d say that there is no guilt in truth. There is only the molding of characters through those initial moments when we are virtual sponges and shaped relentlessly and remorselessly by those already shaped and formed. And they too are innocent.
Incapable of great change by being formed long before we even know it we must find the one avenue of change available to us... to better understand ALL behavior, not merely condemn it and so condemn all of humanity to perpetual war.
NO ONE IS GUILTY | ALL MUST CHANGE
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