(De)Humanization
Daily Meditation 601–10/19/2023
If you were alive in (pre)Nazi Germany, back in the day, do you think you would’ve openly (or even covertly) opposed Hitler or his rabid hatred of the Jews? Stopped them from gassing them?
How about Stalin’s Soviet gulags? The murder of the Kulaks?
Everyone talks big game that “OF COURSE I wouldn’t’ve let it happen.”
But in reality, no.
Nearly none of us would’ve done anything.
In fact, you very likely would’ve helped.
Maybe you wouldn’t be the person shoving a Jew into a zyklon chamber or the NKVD guy arresting a political dissident destined to the gulags…
But maybe when the Gestapo or NKVD came asking “Do you have any juden neighbors?” or “What can you tell me about the kulak family just over there, comrade?” you probably wouldn’t have shrugged and tried to ignore them. You would’ve told them.
And these truly awful genocidal events didn’t “just happen one day.”
They slowly, gradually came to be from years of tiny steps into that direction.
Just like we don’t wake up 300 pounds one day “Oh man, just yesterday I was 125 pounds and a prom queen! Where did these 175 pounds come from?!”
No — we very slowly and inconscientiously made one small (and dietarily, fitness-ly) decision after another which gradually brought us to 300.
So too must we be conscientious of the greater zeitgeist…
It is becoming slowly apparent we have become (blood)thirsty to categorize “others” as not just politically or religiously “wrong” (whatever the heck that means…) but as increasingly nearer to the category of “animals.”
Dehumanization is a dangerous and gradually slippery slope for us.
Many, many others in this wide world disagree with you. And some others may even wish you death (hopefully few) for your beliefs or opinions.
But their way of life, their culture, their beliefs cannot become to us a blunt tool with which we attempt to mobilize “our team” against them.
In short: They live their lives perceiving they are right. (and on the right side of history).
You perceive you are right.
So who is right?
I am unsure.
And I am almost positive you should be unsure as well.
Who gets to be judge and jury over who is right or wrong, here?
In closing, be very wary of the creeping, rising tide inching up the beach of dehumanization.
Today it may seem good.
Tomorrow it may feel “pretty good.”
And the day after not bad at all…
But next week? Next month?
In a year?
Be wary…
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These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”
