Everyone hates each other. At least, that’s the impression you get from looking at the internet for five minutes. If you’re right wing, the left are a bunch of dangerous ideologues that want to outlaw free speech. If you’re left wing, the right are all racist bigots that have a vendetta against poor people. The more you form your own ideas, the more it feels like everyone around you is not only wrong, but also evil. They hold their views not because of a sincere difference in ideals, but because they take pleasure in doing the things you hate. Their beliefs are not a failure of reasoning, but a failure of character.
I get why we feel like this sometimes. I still find myself scoffing as I read headlines and social media posts, feeling as though they were made specifically to attack me. It feels impossible to ignore. Outrage is like a scab you can’t help but pick at. However, I think what we fail to understand is that by and large most people are actually decent. At least, they don’t have malice in their hearts when they vote or act differently to us.
The problem is, we don’t properly imagine how we would act if we were operating under the other person’s belief. It’s easy for me to look at the right wing and think they want to cut public services because they hate poor people, but that’s not the reason they’re usually operating under. People vote right wing because they sincerely think that high tax rates impede entrepreneurship, or that immigration is net bad for the country, or that taxes are theft. If these things are true, voting right wing is not only rational, but good! Now, their beliefs might be mistaken, but the point is that they’re not voting that way because they’re somehow morally corrupted. The world is not filled with bad people doing evil things, it’s filled with decent people doing what they think are good things. It’s just that we often disagree about what’s good. If we can just realise that, disagreements become evidence of a disparity in reasoning, and not a disparity in virtue.
I remember once speaking to a friend about a street preacher we saw, telling people that they’d go to hell if they didn’t repent. My friend was mad at them, because they were bothering people in the street. It hadn’t occurred to them this preacher sincerely believed that the end was nigh. If you think that the rapture is around the corner, and everyone around you is going to suffer an eternity unless you convert them, going out on the street and preaching is actually incredibly virtuous. It’s a great show of character that they were willing to surrender their free time and public image, as well as face vitriol from the public, in order to get a few more souls in heaven. What would be really shitty would be if they had those beliefs and did nothing. If they thought we were all going to burn in hellfire and thought “Eh, at least I’m safe”.
I think we’d all do a lot better if before we got angry at someone, we asked “What beliefs are they operating under?”. If you can answer accurately, you can usually follow it up with “Well, if I believed that, I’d probably be doing what they’re doing too”. Take an issue close to my heart - Animal Rights. It’s easy to get angry at people for paying for animals to be tortured and killed. Once you lift that veil and stop seeing animals as things, suddenly a lot of people can start to look quite callous. Vegans have a stereotype for being angry, and I think that’s because of a lot of them are! However, I think a lot of them forget what it was like before they switched. I ate animals for 25 years, and would dismiss even Vegetarianism as sentimental bullshit. I sincerely believed that it was permissible to eat animals because it was natural. I didn’t eat animals because I hated them and wanted them to suffer. I ate them because I hadn’t thought about it and had a bunch of false beliefs. I wasn’t an evil person doing bad things, I was a misguided person doing bad things - and that distinction makes all the difference.
Now I put “Usually” in the title for a good reason. Obviously, some people really are evil. There do exist psychopaths and sadists - my point is only that they are far less numerous than we often imagine. It’s worth working on the skill of discriminating between them and people who just happen to disagree with us. Even if they’re yelling bible verses at us in the street.
That's probably true for most people, but all the people *I* disagree with are evil and want the worst for everyone - guess I'm just unlucky.
/s
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.
- Aleksander Solzhenitsyn