I've been thinking a lot, recently, about man's reaction to fellow man (my apologies for the gendered terms, but I trust that everyone here understands that I'm not excluding women one bit). Make the jump to see some ideas and questions about how people treat each other.
Recently, there's been no shortage of diaries detailing heinous acts perpetrated by people against their fellow human beings. Of course, it's not only recently, either, but maybe I've just been thinking about it more. Either way, my brain's churned out enough material on the topic to demand that I write about it, so here I am.
Apathy is, I think, the default state for people, especially people we have little or no connection to, or "un-people." Thousands of people were murdered today: I don't really care. It's sad, yes, but I'd be lying if I said I cared... and I'd call you a liar if you said you truly cared, too. You can't care about everyone. The world's a pretty sucky place when you consider the aggregate woes of the six billion (or is it seven now?) hominid bipeds sucking up its resources, and you can't care about all of them. If you did, you'd go insane. Apathy is normal. Sad maybe, unfortunate arguably, but necessary and normal.
This changes, though, when you have control or influence over the people being wronged. I couldn't have saved a single one of those thousands of people who were murdered in cold blood today. Not one. What's more, I genuinely believe (I have to believe) that I'm not doing anything to make their situation worse or to enable those who would harm them. Yes, there's the other extreme: all of us physically could sell our computers, leave our homes, give every cent we have to folks who get the caloric equivalent of one middle-class American dinner in a week, and act in a Mother Theresa-like style to improve their lives... but we don't, and although we honor and revere those few of us who do (again, Mother Theresa springs to mind), it's kind of ridiculous to expect all, or even many, of us to do something like that. The point is, although we all could be doing a lot more, I believe that I, and most of us, aren't actively making these people's lives worse. There are plenty of people, though, who DO have choices to make that can and do ruin people's lives. The targets are easy, really, ripe plump targets to fire the rifle of moral outrage (or at least derision) at. The politicians who tirelessly work to keep the poor poorer, the insurance company higher-ups who write policies specifically designed to deny care to people with legitimate illnesses, the company heads who authorize Chinese sweatshop workers to coat products with heavy metals and other toxins. These people have the ability to make people's lives a hell of a lot worse by making these decisions, and they make them anyway. At least twice I've actually typed out in comments, responding a tale like the ones I just outlined, "how do these people sleep at night?" and I've said it out loud far more often. This is a different kind of apathy: not simply a lack of empathy, but a betrayal of it. We depend on each other to not make our lives worse than they already are. I'm depending on you not to run that red light and squish me. You're depending on me not to verbally harass you as you walk home. In a broader sense, too, we depend on each other not to collapse the systems we have. I'm depending on the investors on Wall Street not suddenly selling every penny of stocks they have and crashing the market. That's a much better example than the basic infringement upon rights I mentioned above... we're all depending on the folks who have billions of dollars in stocks not to sell them all at once and crash the place. They could do it. They choose not to, because to do so would affect them directly, but they could still do it. Let's bust out the tinfoil and play what-if for a minute: What if every single investor on Wall Street were contacted by an alien race (making this as ridiculous as possible so that it's clear that I'm not advocating this) who promised them, convincingly enough that they all unanimously agreed, that they would become kings of multiple planets if on next Tuesday they all, simultaneously, sell every penny of stock they have and crash the market? It would never happen in reality, but the point is, these people do have the ability, if they had incentive or delusions strong enough to ignore the consequences, to ruin our lives, and we depend on them not to. That's not just the lack of empathy, that's a betrayal, like I said above. Now let's take away the direct consequences, the repercussions that people feel directly, for betraying that obligation we have toward the rest of society. The politicians and company heads don't lose their monetary value or viability when they make decisions that will make a whole lot of people's lives a whole lot worse, and so most of them feel free, on some level, to choose to screw over the "un-people," the people you never see and will never meet but whose lives you still ruined. This is where we become justified in condemning apathy. Frankly, I can't understand it. I don't understand how these people can willfully make these decisions which will drastically reduce the quality of life for countless human beings, then get a good night's sleep. I'm not pointing out anything that no one here already knows. We all pretty much agree here that this is despicable. I'm just bringing it up for discussion. Maybe someone else can explain it beyond "valuing money over human lives," because I don't understand that, either.
Then, on the opposite side (or at least a different side) of the issue, we have hatred. There's been plenty of writing around here recently (the recent hate crime legislature, the anniversary of the integration of the Little Rock Nine, the ongoing travesty in Jena, etc.) about the effects of hatred, and frankly, I don't understand it. It was the Little Rock Nine diary that got me really thinking about this, and I'm cribbing heavily from my own comments there. I don't understand the pure, visceral hatred felt by so many people towards other people who've never done anything to them. Racism is the easiest, though not the only, example of this: hardcore racists, such as the segregationists in the Civil Rights Movement, feel true, passionate hatred for those with a different skin tone, and I don't understand why. Fear, I can understand. Aversion, I can understand. Confusion over the unknown, I can understand. But I don't see where those make the jump into anger and hatred, where the desire to not associate with these people who have never affected you directly in any way turns into the desire to inflict harm (physical or otherwise) on them. In my mind, you have to have a trigger for hatred: a repugnant action that removes the hatee from humanity, or causing harm to you or your loved ones, a direct threat. Difference isn't enough of a reason to hate. To me, someone growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, that's simply the way I see things. I literally cannot understand where this hatred of the "other" comes from. I repeat, I know the world isn't all rosy and harmonious, and I totally understand a fear of or aversion to the "other." It's the hatred that baffles me. Somewhere along the line, the mindset of "I don't want to be around these people" mutated into "I hate these people and wish to do them harm," on a mind-boggling scale. One or two individuals I suppose I can understand, but the institutionalized hatred is baffling. How did this spread, and why? How did children, indoctrinated in this culture, learn not just "I don't like them" but "I want to harm them, and to do so is the right thing to do?" It's not just segregation-era, either. This still exists. I don't understand where it comes from or why. To me, I think the only reason I can condemn trust-betraying apathy is because I can understand it. This hatred almost seems like fiction to me: a concept that I can define but can never relate to or understand. That's not to say I've never hated anyone. Just to use the pathetically easy example, I feel true, raw hatred for Dear Leader, George W. Bush... but I have reasons for it. His works have caused nearly irreparable harm to me and the society in which I live, not to mention directly reducing the quality of life of my loved ones. I don't hate him because he's different, I hate him because he has committed atrocities. Groundless hatred just strikes cognitive dissonance in me. Why go out of your way to attack people who have done nothing, whose perceived crimes are "to be" rather than "to do?" Why define yourself like that?
I'm repeating myself, but I know that I'm not bringing up anything new. I'm not claiming to be profound, or to be pointing out anything that no one's said before. This is just my view of it, and I'm hoping your comments will share your views, too.