[deleted] If someone is being beaten by a mob or is lying injured on a road, you should be able to feel that person’s pain. That unique human ability to understand another person’s feelings is called empathy.
The root of all evil is the absence of empathy.
Anything that kills our empathy, makes us evil. When we can’t feel the pain of another human being, we lose all kindness and good sense. We become monsters.
And it can happen to anyone - rich or poor, educated or illiterate, black, brown, or white. Education is of no help.
And very often, when people want to kill our empathy, as a bait, they use lofty ideas such as religion, nationalism, patriotism, equality, liberty, etc. The examples are far too many.
Nazis used a hate-filled version of nationalism to make fellow Germans stop seeing Jews as human beings. Once you don’t consider someone human, you can’t feel empathy. Once that happened, the whole German nation became a silent or active participant in the biggest mass murder in human history.
Similarly, communism abused the idea of equality to brand people as ‘class enemy’. And to suppress the class enemy, they made the Party supreme, not the individual. Once you were branded as a class enemy or a counter-revolutionary, in their eyes, you were not human anymore. It resulted in mass murders across the globe - from Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to Stalin’s Soviet Union, to Mao’s China, and to today’s North Korea.
What about religion? I think violence in the name of religion has exceeded any other violence since the dawn of civilization. And it works the same way - once we believe that a follower of another religion is less human than us, we can justify any kind of evil.
All I can say is, let us be kind to others and to ourselves. Someday, we will need someone else’s kindness. Let us earn it now.
