It seems to me that the greatest risk to the survival of humanity is our tendency to kill each other as often as we can, and in the greatest possible numbers. The worst cases of this that are to be found in our history have one thing in common. They were driven by greed, fueled by hate, and carried out by fanatics who obeyed without question, even when obedience was madness.
We could be talking about any number of genocidal atrocities across the globe and the ideological spectrum. Over time, however, things have changed. With the evolution of technology has come the ability to exterminate each other massively; the destructive potential of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are common knowledge. The fear of self-extinction by technological means has found its way into popular culture, expressed in prototype by the wave of UFO movies during the height of the Cold War – danger from the sky – and more recently by the “mega-disaster” movies around the turn of the 21st century, followed by the “zombie apocalypse” scenario that has grown into a genre of its own. A deep terror of extinction is finding expression in human culture today.
Obviously, most of us would like nothing better than to live peacefully in the company of family and friends, without a care for the fashions in which other people far away might be preparing their meals, wearing their clothes, giving thanks for their blessings, or paying their taxes. But a small minority lies awake at night hating unknown Others for their failure to Be The Way I Want Them To Be. These lost souls provide useful tools for the egomaniacs who plot ways to manipulate their fellow human beings in their unrestrained lust for power.
The grand villains have always understood that massive violence depends on ideological extremism. Religious fervor has served well, from the Crusades through the genocide sanitized by the euphemism “Conquest of the Americas”, and up to the present day as a neofascist faction within our own government stokes racist fears of foreign refugees, separating families and caging children on our southern border for profit; it fuels anti-Muslim hatred and channels the power into destabilizing the Middle East and attempting to start a war with Iran, as always, for profit. A one-minute video clip from any Trump rally is enough to demonstrate the congruence between religious extremism and the capacity to serve as a tool for the greedy. The affinity of the megachurch crowd for hard-right wing authoritarians is no coincidence; there is no more gullible mark than one whose mind has been trained not to ask questions.
In the absence of religion, any kind of ideological extremism will do. From the Stalinist and Maoist purges of the 1950s to the more recent mass murder of dissidents by US-supported fascist death squads in Latin America, totalitarian regimes have used terror to turn neighbors, friends, and relatives against each other. None of this is possible without ideological extremism: in order to make large numbers of people do terrible things they would never otherwise have done, a powerful idea is needed to capture their imagination and keep them from asking the uncomfortable questions.
Questions such as: how is it possible to hate someone I don’t even know? Why am I angry at strangers who have done me no harm?
Ideological extremism requires a closed mind. It demands that questions not be asked. It excludes by default all competing ideas and declares its own truths to be self-evident – even when these “truths” are in direct contradiction to observable fact. But most people have a limit beyond which the mechanism of self-deception will no longer work.
I used to be an ideological extremist of the fundamentalist Christian variety. I memorized large portions of the Bible and believed the dogma without question. What changed my mind was not a competing ideology, though; it was a gradually dawning understanding that I had been lied to. The people I had been taught to see as enemies were, for the most part, just people. Some beliefs I had held without question turned out to be half-truths at best and complete fabrications at worst. It was tempting to retreat from the growing light, to take shelter in the accustomed ways, the comforting familiar thoughts. It was difficult and painful to compare my own culture and Other cultures with brutal honesty. It was liberating to realize that the best parts of me and of my culture are not those things which make us different, but those traits we share with all of humanity. Individual expression is lovely because it is a variation on a common theme. The tricky part is letting go of the idea that there is something intrinsically better about one’s own particular variation.
It has been said that, when you come to understand your enemies, you cannot hate them. This says nothing about your enemies’ attitude towards you; they may lack understanding and hate you as intensely as ever. But understanding is incompatible with hate. Once you see in your enemy the reflection of yourself, something changes. You are no longer capable of doing unto others that which you would not want done unto yourself. This does not mean surrendering to aggression. The absence of hatred does not equal gullibility, weakness of will, or submission. It is possible to fight to preserve the innocent from destruction with no hatred for one’s opponents but an absolute determination to end their destructive acts.
There is no quick solution. But if most people have a tipping point of knowledge beyond which they cannot cling to the conviction of self-righteousness, then that is the point towards which it is incumbent upon the rest of us to advance the popular consciousness. There are as many ways to accomplish this task as there are people of good will and sound mind; each of us must speak truth at every opportunity and reject falsehood and illusion wherever they are encountered. Above all, we must tear down walls of ignorance and fear by rejecting stereotypes and prejudice, and by refusing to participate in excluding others because they are Others.
Socrates said, “There is no good but knowledge, no evil but ignorance.” Education, not a perpetuation of violence, is the way out of the darkness. It is, as Nelson Mandela said, the most powerful weapon with which to change the world. To see Others as one’s neighbors, as defined in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, is the education that humanity most urgently needs. Most people know this in their hearts to be true. Many are blinded by ideology to reject facts and logic, but some of these are willing to see.
Ignorance, like fungus, cannot thrive in the light. The world turns inexorably towards the sun. May the dawn come swiftly.