kerravonsen | Entries tagged with morals

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There is no "us and them". There is only "us". Why can't they see that?

...Ooops.

That was a sequence of thoughts which occurred to me a couple of weeks ago. I struggled with it for a while. Because how can I embrace "them" when "they" do awful things? How can I embrace rich men and politicians and other distasteful people? How can I love my enemies?

Then it came to me.

There is no "us and them". There is only "me and you".

That is my new mantra. I am trying to live by it.

To explain: sure, every person is part of a group, indeed, part of many groups, and those groups do inform that person's behaviour. But each person is also an individual, sole and unique. So treat every person you interact with as an individual, no matter WHAT groups they may belong to, even if they are part of the "not-we".

Being Continuum last weekend, I tried to keep this in mind... and my life has already been the richer for it.

\o/

(Yes, there will be Continuum report, but probably tomorrow.)

Crossposts: http://kerravonsen.livejournal.com/968942.html

Prompted by a piece of fanfic that disturbed me on a level that I couldn't articulate, I looked up the Milgram experiment. I already knew about the general results, that a high proportion of people will obey authority even when it goes against their own morals. Which is a terribly depressing statistic, and makes me weep for humankind, that we are so helpless to resist evil.

However, looking at the details, including variants of the experiment which changed certain conditions, there were two heartening results:( Read more... )