We have a problem.
I have been trying to write this post for years, and I feel like I’ve never managed to get even half of the scope of it at once. It’s hard to hold in my head, and even harder to say in words, but I feel urgently that I have to try, because the consequences are so dire and so widespread. So I am going to try, and I ask that you try your hardest to listen, because this is important.
We have a problem.
We humans conceive of ourselves in negative space. Our first concept of self is not “this is me.” It is “this is not you.” I am not you. I am me, and I know that because you go away and I am still here. You are tall and I am short. You are a boy and I am a girl. You are black and I am white. I create myself by pushing you away, making you other in order to make myself me. This, I think, is probably necessary. It is also the root of a virus that will wipe humanity from the earth if we don’t find a way to mitigate the damage.
We perceive things in the abstract. We must. To do otherwise is madness – we would quickly go insane from the information overload. We have stereotypes and biases and shorthand because they work, and we need them to cope with anything outside our own personal houses. This, too, is necessary, and this, too, is horribly dangerous.
We have a problem.
The process we go through of dividing the world so we may be individuals and understand our surroundings makes us blind to what is really there. It enables us to be callous in ways that we are pretty much incapable of on a personal level. It helps us dehumanize others, categorize them, and judge them in ways that are not only unfair, but often catastrophic. If they aren’t people, if they are a group, they stop existing in our personal landscape and start existing as an abstraction, one that we freely castigate, deride, and, all too often, decide it’s okay to kill.
We all know this, but even that knowledge suffers from the same issue. It’s a problem that they have, not us. I don’t do that, they do. I am an honorable person, I wouldn’t harm anyone. That’s what the bad people do. The bad people who are other, who are not me. People who are more like me are better than people who are less like me, because I know I would never shoot someone in the face, no matter how much I disagree with their life philosophy. That’s something bad people do. Where by bad, of course, I mean not like me.
This probably isn’t news, but we certainly act like we’ve forgotten it: No one thinks they are the bad guys. To the people you think are the bad ones? You are the bad one. And the thing about it is, you’re both right. Because you have forgotten, at least from time to time, that that abstraction you hold in your mind is not the reality. It is a representation made up of a whole slew of shorthand that is meant to help you hold the world in your mind. Acting as if the abstraction is the reality is what makes us bad guys. All of us. I am the bad guy. You are. We all do this.
We have a problem.
When I have a category in my head that holds millions of people – say, Muslims – and the news comes on and I hear that a Muslim person has murdered a bunch of people, what is the next step? Is it that someone committed a horrible act? Is it even that one Muslim committed a horrible act? Or is it that Muslims commit horrible acts? That the Islamic faith breeds murderers? That it is my job to speak out against Islam? That Muslims are intrusive murdering fucks who won’t leave me alone and let me live my life in peace?
What if more than one of them do it? Is it okay now? How many have to do it before it’s okay to change my mental abstraction from “people who believe X and Y are Muslim” to “people who believe X and Y are killers” to “Muslims are killers” to “religious people are killers”?
I get how the chain goes and why it’s sometimes difficult to defend the opposite position, particularly if you’re personally affected by situations that seem to lend truth to some or all of the above statements. But, just for a second, try changing “Muslim” to “American”. Are Americans intrusive murdering fucks who won’t leave other people alone and let them live their lives in peace? I bet you a whole lot of people think so. Are they wrong? Or are they guilty of abstracting too hard and forgetting about the actual majority of us who haven’t and probably won’t ever kill anyone at all?
The first step in every chain I can think of that ends in an act of violence is not “I believe in a deity” or “I am a black person” or “I am a man.” It’s “I am not you.” The first step to harming another is making them separate from you. The further removed they get from you, the easier it becomes. The further they are, the less present and real are the consequences. Their pain is as abstract as they are, and we care less and less about them the more different they become.
There are no really easy answers to any of this. We have to make abstractions, I think, at least I haven’t been able to come up with any better way to do things. Our incoming information makes use of yet more abstractions. But I can’t seem to get my head around the notion that perpetuating the abstractions is the way to fix this. I can’t believe that attributing responsibility for any of this to some group or other and deciding they are at fault for the problems we are all facing right now is the way to find solutions.
We are all at fault. We are all responsible.
It’s true that religious extremists kill people. It’s true that atheist extremists kill people. It’s true that political extremists kill people. What is the common factor? Hint: It’s not God.
It’s us.
We have a problem.