I said I would elaborate on my outlook at some point, and. Is it ok if I break down for a bit?
Things are going bad. It's very obvious. Society is falling into facism and bigotry because the people demanded it. Every day I go online and see it. "You don't hate them enough."
But I don't hate. I don't get angry. I just get sad.
I don't let myself hate. Hatred only makes things worse. Hatred is what caused this, hatred is what birthed this. Hatred only clouds judgement. It reduces them to one dimensional villains who just want to hurt. It reduces your capacity to empathize. It reduces your capacity to love. It spreads and spreads until you can't stop hating. Until you hate everyone and everything.
For me to have any hope, I can't hate. I need to see these people and understand them. But as things get worse and worse, the less people wake up the more my sadness swells. And the voice inside that says I should hate is fed, and the louder it grows the more sad I become.
I can't accept this. I cannot accept that these people would do this harm because they are pure evil. They have to be shaped into this. They have to be believing lies. They have to be victims themselves who have been separated from reality and molded into tools for destruction. Because if that isn't it. If this is how people are. Then what hope do we have? How can we ever live in a free society where a very large portion of people are pure evil? That's why I have to see the other side. That's why I have to understand. That's why I need to empathize and humanize and not give in to hate.
But every day they make it harder. Every day I see the worst of what humanity has to offer. And I understand the need to hate. But if this many people are just enemies, then what is our solution? Let our hatred resolve? Opress them? Eliminate them? I don't want that. I don't think anyone reading this wants that. That is facist. That is authoritarianism. That is everything we are fighting. For the society we hope for with the progressive aspirations we seek and that they are fighting against to be viable, people have to be good. My faith in humanity is the only thing keeping me going. It's the only thing that gives me any hope for the future.
But it's so hard to have this faith. They are making it so hard to empathize and humanize and hope they can be better and that they are not the monsters I am told to hate. If the hate wins, then we have no hope. But hate is winning. They are hating. And we are hating. And I'm so sick of the hate. I can't stand this hate. I can't hope with this hate. I can't live with this hate. I can't love with this hate.
Introduction:
I understand the struggle you're dealing with. It's hard, and one I've grappled with myself. You're definitely not alone in facing it.
There's no one right way to go about it, but I'll tell you how I do – both in specific answers to specific questions, and ways I think about approaching the question more broadly. I encourage you to take what is helpful to you from it.
I wrote about it some
before, which I'll link to provide more thoughts and coverage. I still agree with what I said the, but I've also had new thoughts I'll add here.
"What Is It That We Are Doing?" and Clarity
When we think about approaching the world not with hatred, but with empathy, understanding, and hope – in short, when we approach the world with love over hatred – both are a type of two-way street.
In one direction, there's how we approach the world, which we can change. Why do we love? Why do we hate? We can't perfectly dictate our own psychologies, but we still have a lot of control over how we think, how we process our feelings, and how we grow into new perspectives and capabilities.
In another direction, there is the state of the world. I'm using "world" in a broad sense here, for factors that are more outside our control, and less in our individual ability to change into something else. Here, "the world" includes both how other individuals think and feel and act, and broader societal and systemic forces. Of course, we can influence the world in lots of ways, but again, it is more outside our control than our own approach.
For us to love or to hate, our
emotional approach must be compatible with the
the world. If we need certain reasons to love, the world must have those reasons in order for us to love. If we need certain reasons to hate, those must also be present.
This conclusion may sound simple and obvious. It ain't rocket science, and some other parts of this post won't be rocket science, either. I lay these simple ideas out carefully, and explicitly, because
mental and emotional clarity are important (and sometimes underappreciated) tools to help us navigate these challenges.
To be clear, while clarity is important, seeming obstacles to clarity, like strong emotions, are great too. Strong emotions, and likewise strong principles and beliefs, are guiding streetlights that help us navigate the world. When things make us feel really bad, well, there's a solid chance that the thing is bad, and maybe it should not be that way, and maybe we should avoid it! These guide responses provide a
foundation for making sense of what we see and do.
However, if we lean too unbalancedly into these guide, we can get stuck. This is especially possible for complex situations that make us feel strongly and strongly affect our goals, like the existence of evil in the world. As a foundation to apply to many situations, they don't change strongly in
adaptation to different situations. Therefore, they can lead us to mistakes. An authority figure may feel bad when they are challenged by someone they hold authority over, but that negative emotion does not mean the authority figure should go unchallenged. The challenge
could be unwarranted, but it could also be important advice!
When we also have clarity, when we lay out and understand what we are doing and why, we help ourselves avoid these mistakes. For example, we can accept our strong emotional feelings – not shying away from our emotions – while also rationally understanding that, even still, we don't need to follow their implicit recommended actions.
In navigating the role of evil in our world, you are tackling a complicated and intense challenge, and already have very strong foundation-type responses, very understandably! That makes clarity especially important. Your post makes a lot of steps to establish clarity, and you've already put a lot of valuable work in understanding your reasons and motivations for your thoughts and beliefs, clearly.
I encourage you to continue on that track. Next, I'll outline some answers my clarity has gotten me. They're not "the right" answers such that others are wrong, but they have insights and have helped me. They may not be your answers, but they may have pieces you like, and I encourage you to take such pieces.
My Answers
I frame these in terms of the two directions I talked about earlier, the state of the world first, and my approach second.
"What makes the world potentially lovable?"
- Our existence as humanity is inherently a wonder. The choices we make, how we can think and feel, how we can form connections, is a miracle of life.
- Even when situations are unjust, there is often much good and just inside them. Many people who experience injustice have much love and goodness in their lives. That does not make the injustice
good, of course, but sometimes we lack clarity and forget the good while focusing on the bad.
- Learning someone was harassed for being gay may provoke a stronger emotional response than learning they had a overall good year otherwise, but would you trade away the rest of the year in exchange for wiping away the day of harassment? Would they make that trade?
- The world can pose immense challenges and immense complexities. We often note that people may not know better, or were raised in a hateful environment, which gets at this point. But we can be more general. Even when people learn more and find better environments, adjusting beliefs and thoughts and opinions is
hard, and like anything else hard, people may fail! Do individual failures like this end their worth, even if they do many other good things (which directly shows they are not pure evil)? Personally, I do not think so!
- This is even more true if they're facing particular challenges that make change even harder, as is often true. It's harder to thoughtfully reconsider your beliefs when you're working 50 hours a week – or more – of sapping manual labor to put food on the table for your partner and children.
I want to caution you that, since this is a two-way street, the above question will
never be the full story. If someone is inherently unwilling to love, altogether or under certain conditional circumstances, and unwilling to budge from that position, no amount of justification of the world's lovable nature will
force them to love, and endlessly seeking justification for a fundamentally impossible task can become a snipe hunt. With a foundation non-adaptive enough, you can justify (or fail to justify) anything. You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
The above question is getting closer to the water. The next question is actually drinking it.
"What makes me potentially able to love?"
I used to be too caught up in justifications here. I wanted to be more loving, but I felt like I couldn't love people who were very flawed in certain ways, or maybe even outright evil.
That feeling was wrong! There's nothing that stops or prevents me from loving. I can love whoever I want. I can't micro-control my psyche, and perspectives can take time to develop, but I can choose to approach situations with a desire to love, and I increasingly have. People have done things to upset me, and I've thought, I can try to love, to understand them, connect with them, be closer to them, and I've learned a lot and felt a lot better from trying to do that. Sometimes I misunderstood them and thought the harm was greater than it was, and sometimes
I wasn't wrong and they did actually mess up that badly, but that distinction didn't have to matter in terms of access to my love. That was under my power. I could have justified not loving, and I didn't. Nothing prohibits me from loving. Both adopting that mentality, and practicing it sometimes (not all times – I am human!), helped.
With this unbound mentality and all the reasons the world could be lovable, there's a lot that makes me able to love. Finding the good in people and situations and anything, and emotionally taking in and healing from that goodness, is something we get better at with time. But on the note of being clear-minded and explicit – part of the reason I love is because, straightforwardly, free from moral judgments,
it feels good.
Good feels good, and
not good feels not good! By taking control of how I process situations and actions and people, and choosing to find the positive in them, it lifts my spirits and gives me strength and drive. Explanations are great, but sometimes it's also just about actually
doing the thing.
