Stop Rooting Against Evil
The year is 2018.
The latest trend: “Speak your truth, you have a voice and your opinion matters”.
The soapbox on which to stand so you can speak your truth: social media.
The likes from your aunts and friends from sociology class come rolling in at breakneck pace, and you realize that you do have this whole thing figured out after all. So you take it upon yourself to be the change the world needs and assert your dominance over all the muppets who are foolish enough to disagree with you. You get into a spirited bout, tell them that people like them are the problem with the world, give yourself a pat on the back and go to sleep peacefully after a hard day of decent work.
But you know who else is sleeping peacefully? School shooters, cult leaders, soon-to-be suicide bombers, and the person you were arguing with on Facebook about which one of you is ruining civilization.
Now bear with me. This is because even though each of you probably have extremely different ways of looking at society, you’ve all fulfilled your need for significance. You’ve all fulfilled, or plan to fulfill, your duty of keeping things right in the world.
One of the easiest things to forget and one of the most important things NOT to forget is the fact that everyone is doing their best with what they’re given. Thanks to a New York-priced cocktail of genetics and cognitive biases, most of the people you assume to be evildoers have simply been brought up to believe in a different cause than you have, and for every statistic or piece of information you’ve been exposed to that proves their theory wrong, is a statistic or piece of information THEY’VE been exposed to that proves YOUR theory wrong.
Yeah, you might still argue that it’s too bad they’ve been raised that way, but at the end of the day, they’re fucking idiots if they can’t see past that and adopt your way of thinking — the RIGHT way of thinking. And if they aren’t on your side, they’re perpetuating the problem, and therefore they don’t really deserve sympathy or an attempt at being understood.
So you root against them. You root against evil. And in a flash, we’ve come completely full circle.
Because here’s the kicker: you feel significant when you speak or act out against them for opposing your view of the world, and THEY feel significant when they speak or act out against YOU for opposing THEIR way of the world. In short, the more you vilify that which you disagree with, the more you perpetuate it. So unsurprisingly, due to the many vehicles that implore us to share our stories and beliefs, the rise of both demonizing others and heinous activity continue to skip merrily along, hand in hand.
Congratulations, you more than likely have some degree of evil in you and are helping everything go to shit.
Depending on who you are, though, and the severity of your actions, you might have a hard time understanding this. Surely someone who has murdered people is more likely to understand why so many others have deemed them as evil than someone who catches hatred on a daily basis for going to some march or purchasing a rifle.
Well, really it’s because you’re getting in the way of someone else’s view of progress. And the sad truth is, they’re probably right. As long as you’re rooting against them, you ARE the problem. If you’re still feeling childish, however, you’ll take solace in the fact that they too, are the problem for rooting against you. Allow me to explain:
Whatever side of the coin you’re on, if you’re rooting for evil to fail, you’re simultaneously not rooting for evil to better itself. Wanting anyone to go down in flames so your ego can get tickled means you’re not rooting for them to straighten themselves out and help lead the world into a better direction. Such behavior is most certainly not progressive.
So do you not have more in common with these foes of yours than you might’ve thought? Are you just using judgment to stop progress instead of using a handgun? Ask yourself: If you really want progress, how much are your actions really reflecting that?
Tough stuff here, guys. I know these looks in the mirror can be very difficult, so I congratulate you if you stayed long enough to get to this point in the article, and I congratulate you if you were at least receptive to these ideas even if you still disagree with them. And that would be ok, because I promise I’m not rooting against you.
