Whenever we talk about human emotions, we assume that love is one of those emotions which come naturally to us. This means, that given a general situation, it should be easier for us to love somebody than to hate them. We may sometime not necessarily love someone in an obvious way but our reaction will be far away from being full of hate or just out-and-out vengeful.
Obviously, while saying that, we assume that all of us do represent a semblance of God’s favourite creation. Of course, not all of us are created alike and we all have our own idiosyncrasies, but at a very fundamental level, one expects all of us to be a little human.
Having established this, we may wish to take a look around ourselves to corroborate the same. We expect to find a certain degree of sanity, compassion, humility and a little bit of humanity in our daily lives. What we find instead is people just reacting to situations in a harsh, often violent and disgraceful ways. One may argue that each and every situation cannot be dealt with in a balanced and thoughtful way, but a deep breath is the least which is expected from the most intelligent species on this planet.
So far, we have listed the expectations as well as the actual happenings in any interaction involving humans. The next step is to connect the dots and establish why there is a yawning gap between the two sides of this equation. There cannot be a definite answer to this. A series of systematic emotional breakdowns have caused this domino effect.
For instance, nowadays we are not able to distinguish between good and evil, because nothing is absolute in terms of its virtues. There is no definition of right and wrong and there is always a justification for any action taken. In such a scenario, the reconstruction of the reasons behind the animosity and the hatred becomes a complex one.
In this attempt, we need to understand the power of perception and the belief systems of people, which eventually forces somebody to react in a particular way. More often than not, it is a mixture of all the aforementioned constructs which decides our action as well as reaction.
In a world where there is a constant need to be right, it imperatively weakens one’s ability to accept views other than your own. We have lost ourselves in this filthy sea of self-righteousness. Anything which moves against our flow is necessarily construed as wrong, or in some cases worthy of obliteration. We are so sure of our belief systems that we have reduced the complex world of human interactions into a world of binary numbers. There is a covert presence of quotes like “My way or the highway” or “Either you are with us or you are against us” which has reduced the thinking man to a yes man.
In such a scenario, words like hate, anger etc. often become a small figment of what they actually represent. For it is just not enough to say it, it becomes inevitable to show it.