The most depraved state of being I can imagine is that of fearing and hating Other-ness. Unfortunately, it’s also part of the natural tendency of every mortal: to imagine that all creatures outside of our own accepted parameters, whether by choice or by birth or by accident, are somehow a threat to our selves and our happiness and state of perfection.

We have all known terrible beauty

There’s hardly one among us past infancy that hasn’t experienced some sort of loss and grief and disaster, and it’s the general practice to associate such events with some kind of zero-sum social economics asserting that anything lost in one’s own life is necessarily offset, if not caused, by someone else’s gain. The underlying assumption is that outsiders or anyone not to my own taste must be scheming endlessly to supplant me in my intended paradise and if they don’t share my specific (and obviously self-defined) interests, destroying me in order to usurp my throne is logically the desired mode. Ergo, the only way to avoid that is to destroy all Others preemptively, and if it can’t be accomplished with mere fear- and hate-mongering, then it will be by any means possible.

That’s the powerful source of horrifying mass murders and terrorism and war criminality. It’s where people like Norway’s monstrous 22 July attacker are formed.

"He seemed okay . . . we didn't know him very well . . . just a kind of quiet guy . . . sort of kept to himself . . . "

More terribly, though, there’s a little of that doomsday design in every little thought of disapproval and self-righteous judgement we find so insidiously creeping up inside each of us in our worst moments, and it tars and feathers us all. Hate is a remarkably easy sell and counter-logic rolls right over Jane and Joe Average like Niagara Falls the minute one plays on their universal fears. It’s why we have increasingly polarized political views all around the world, but perhaps most notably here in freedom-preaching America, Land of the Free to Share My Beliefs and Home of the Brave Talk about Equality and Melting-Pot Roots. And I tend to think of this also as a time when a great many worldwide have completely blurred the line between religion and politics, another wonderfully convenient way in which one can equivocate about what is belief, what is desire, and what is fact.

Me, I don’t have a clue how to change something that I think is so deeply ingrained in simply existing as living persons. What I do know is that the only antidote within my view is personally embracing peace, tolerance, increased understanding, and compassion and believing that I may gradually become a better person for a start. No promises, only hope.