On compassion and gumballs
I’ve been working on a mental model that helps me understand and empathize with seemingly insane people, from Palestinian suicide bombers to WWII Nazis.
It works like this. Think of every human on Earth as a gumball in a giant gumball machine, that someone has sneakily filled with water (if you've ever held a wet gumball, you know that its color transfers to whatever it touches). No gumball decides where it’s placed in the gumball machine, it’s just born there, but they’re all made from the same ingredients and initially colorless.

If a gumball was placed in the 1930's Germany section of the gumball machine, it would absorb the color of neighboring gumballs, including defeated WWI vets impoverished due to hyperinflation and perhaps Adolph Hitler.
If it was placed in the 21st-century America section of the gumball machine, right next to parent gumballs who are evangelical Christians, it would absorb their color.
And so on.
Remember, every gumball is made out of the same ingredients, so whatever color it absorbs is purely a function of the gumballs surrounding it. It doesn’t choose its color, happenstance does.
This mental model helps me feel compassion towards gumballs (i.e., people) with a much different color than my gumball, because if I happened to be born in their section of the gumball machine, I’d likely have the same color.
Of course, this leads to some jarring implications —had I been placed in a different section of the gumball machine, I could have been a Nazi, a slave owner, a thief, perhaps even a serial killer.
I’m not ignoring the effect of free will, which in this analogy, you could imagine as swimming to a different section of the gumball machine. But our little gumballs are constrained by the time and space of their placement and can only swim so far away. And even then, some of the color they’ve absorbed will never be washed away.
The good news is that modern marvels like the Internet and low-cost jet flight are acting as giant wooden spoons placed throughout the gumball machine, blending colors together from various sections. I can foresee a future where all gumballs share a similar color — the color of fundamental human nature.
I think that color is quite beautiful.
