Darkness in my heart

Recently I finished reading about The French Revolution and some of facts made me think about nuances of human nature.

The Revolution started when oppressed people rebelled against their oppressors, but quickly spiraled into a blood bath. Why so many people took part in this madness? The same words can be said about many, many present and historical events. People suddenly becomes blood-thirsty monsters. Is it some general flaw of human nature? I think it may be. Let’s look around. Times before II Word War. The current polarized political scene. The hate against LGBTQ+ people. There are way too many examples.

And this flaw is a critical one. Easy to exploit and with very serious consequences. If it was CVE I would assign it a very high score.

I think this serious flaw is sum of 2 others: the tendency to faulty generalization and violence against a group someone consider enemies.

Faulty generalization is the first problem I think someone should be aware of.

One example: Let’s assume for a while that we believe that blue eyed people are pure and kind, while the only trait common for blue eyed people is that they have blue eyes. Even when scientists would found some genetic link between blue eyes and pure and soft nature, mutations exists and the probability of finding an evil blue eyed person is non-zero, so this generalization is wrong.

The next problem is violence against enemies. People are capable of terrible things when they consider other side as enemy. When somebody is considered enemy there is no empathy and many people will be ready to use any means to destroy the one considered enemy. This one might be survival instinct and protecting our relatives and friends might not be fully evil, but anything above this point might be make us the oppressors. I’m not sure about my stance on it. I need to think more about where the border is.

And worst thing and the point of this post is that I found myself not an exception. While I’m full of empathy for victims of way too many recent events. I have found that that I’ve very limited empathy for victims of recent terrorist attacks in Moscow. So the seeds are planted, and darkness in my heart is sprouting. And I don’t like it at all. The whole operation might be false flag, suffering people might even be against war but openly expressing such opinion might have dramatic consequences for them and their families. But I have limited empathy for them. Just because they are Russian. And this is the starting point of way with no return to the place I don’t want to go.

I don’t know if it is general flaw, common for whole population or not. But I think it is prevalent enough to be serious problem when we want to build violence- and oppression- -free society. At this point I must accept the fact that this inherent evil is present in my heart and it goes against my values.

I must develop some kind of precaution to not become just an another tool for the next charismatic evil psychopath. The awareness of this flaw is the crucial first step many people need to take.

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