Massive cold and cough, exams, submissions.....some of the things that held me up for the past one month. But now, peace for one week hopefully.
Peace. I wonder what it actually means. Blaise Pascal once said, and I quote “we seek rest in a struggle against some obstacles. And when we have overcome these, rest proves unbearable because of the boredom it produces...How hollow and full of garbage is the heart of man”
Thus, in this boredom, I find that I have difficulty sitting down in one place and writing. No amount of Counterstrike or movie/anime watching seems to be able to defeat the boredom. The next best thing to beat boredom (in my case) is to browse the internet. But here too, what do I see? Below are the headlines of major news websites.
Suicide bomber strikes at Quetta rally, 59 killed
Blast rocks Hare Krishna temple in London
Hostage crisis: different cop's body found
Pak match fixing row stems from a 'moral crisis'
Mind you, these are headlines of just today. Over the last one week, there have been many more. And no one knows how many more will happen.
There is so much hatred in this world. Pein, one of the characters of the popular anime Naruto, asks this question: Injustice leads to Hatred. Hatred leads to Vengeance. Vengeance, when wreaked under the banner of justice, only leads to more hatred, thereby triggering a cycle of Hatred. This cycle plagues the world right now. How would you put an end to this hatred and bring peace?
How to break this cycle and bring peace? Our leaders have been trying to answer this question for years, but all have failed in providing a satisfactory answer. That makes me wonder if it is indeed instinctive for humans to war. Are we, humans, at a very basic level, war-mongering? My opinion is that, yes, at a basic level, we generally have a habit of comparison, which leads to jealousy (grass greener on the other side), which leads to competition. This competition has almost always ended in war. Those of you who may be Matrix fans might recall that the first Matrix version was built as a utopia, but failed catastrophically because humans were unwilling to believe it to be real. Hence, a state of no war and total peace is unreal to humans. Theories of Evolution also support the hypothesis that, once, we humans, being animalistic in nature, competed for resources with others.
So, if it is instinctive, are we doomed never to find a solution to this problem? Another great anime, DeathNote, (you might be thinking that I spend a lot of time watching animes, but I swear, these are the only two animes that I follow) poses the same question in a different manner.
To those who have not seen DeathNote, I’ll try to explain the basic plot. Yagami Light, a top student and a strong believer in justice, finds a magical notebook. Any human, whose name is written in the notebook, dies. Yagami Light uses this notebook to kill all the top criminals (terrorists, murderers and so on). He, being driven by his own strong sense of justice, believes that fear of death can surely force people to do good deeds instead of bad.
Another character, known in the anime as L, going by his strong sense of justice believes that such mass killing of people, even though they be criminals, is wrong. He then employs his genius to attempt to capture Yagami Light.
Pause for a moment and ask yourself. Do you support Light Yagami or L? In the midst of society, most would tend to support L. However, there are good arguments for Light Yagami too. The point that was brought out in the anime is that this world is too rotten to cure itself from crime and hatred unless you use fear and pain to control it.
Now, to the point I was trying to make: Many people in the world (mostly American) claim that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was infact a good thing, because it ended the war soon and thus saved lives of many thousands of people who might have died had the war prolonged.
This is not the only example where fear and pain have been used to tame hatred. The entire American Black versus White history is tainted with guns and deaths, because, humans have only found fear as an effective solution to hatred.
Thus, so far, despite our engineering/financial marvels, we have yet to learn to answer Pein’s question. I’m not quite sure if an answer exists and I’m not going to say that ‘there is still hope that humans will understand one another’. What I can hope for is that we move higher up in the evolution faster than ever before so that we move away from our bestial past and go towards a better cultural and spiritual evolution. Of course, this evolution might lead to various effects; perhaps we may no longer remain homo sapiens when this evolution happens.
