Let's Stop Killing One Another
Just a suggestion
Being the 41st edition of Assorted Nonsense, the official newsletter of Donovan Street Press Inc.
Hey, here’s an idea:
Let’s stop killing one another.
No, really. The next time you find yourself about to kill someone…
Don’t!
I’m telling you, it’s a bad idea.
You might think, “What is Joe talking about? I wasn’t planning on killing anyone today. Or any day. Cuz killing’s wrong. I’ve never deliberately killed anyone, nor do I intend to.”
If so, good for you!
But there are people who do kill people. Snipers, for example. I have it on good authority that it’s part of the job description.
To those of us leading conventional, civilized lives the idea of taking another person’s life makes no sense at all. It’s completely anathema to us. And yet it happens all the time. It is happening throughout the world as I write this.
Imagine if nobody killed anybody. No wars. No murders. What if that sort of thing was relegated strictly to fiction? What a great world this could be.
Instinctively most of know this would be a great idea. The crazy thing is there shouldn’t even be any question about it. It should just be a given: Killing = Bad. It should be unthinkable. Heck, it’s one of the Ten Commandments, central to a good many western religions: “Thou shalt not kill.” (Though weirdly, in the version I looked at, it’s only number six, less important than “honour thy father and thy mother” but slightly more important than “thou shalt not commit adultery.”)
And yet humans continue to kill one another.
Mosquitoes kill more humans than humans do, but they don’t mean to kill us (um, as far as I know). They’re just a vector for disease. The animal that kills most humans deliberately is humans themselves, as many as 475,000 homicides per year.
And then there’s war. World War II killed 50 to 85 million people. That war is the worst so far. The American Civil war killed up to one million, and it’s just 46th on the “List of Wars by Death Toll.” (The next American Civil war will no doubt top that.)
For something that I think most of us would agree should be unthinkable, people killing other people happens an awful lot.
We don’t like it when people we know die. We grieve. If somebody we know loses someone close to them, we express our condolences. It can be awkward; sometimes we don’t really know what to say (or write) but we all agree that it’s sad, and we wish it hadn’t happened.
It’s so final. Our loved ones die and all we’re left with is memories. Some of us believe in life after death in some fashion, others don’t, but the truth is nobody knows for sure what happens after death. For a fact our loved ones are gone from this life forever and they’re never coming back. It’s bad enough if they’re gone because of old age, illness, or accident. But if someone killed them deliberately? Made them go away forever without even knowing for sure what (if anything) comes afterwards? That’s just not cool (to say the least).
And that’s just the death of one or two people. What about when it happens on a mass scale? In the millions, say? Or tens of millions? If we get that choked up over one death, shouldn’t millions absolutely devastate us? And yet people are killed in enormous numbers by other human beings on a deeply disturbing and way-too-often basis.
Myself, I think life is precious. To be savoured. Nurtured. Protected.
But not everyone agrees. To some, life is cheap.
Just to pick one example, look at this list of mass executions and massacres in Yugoslavia during World War II. (Or don’t, if you don’t want to be depressed all day.)
It’s a long list. And that’s just Yugoslavia. This sort of thing happened all over Europe during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II. People carting truckloads and trainloads of other people to certain death and mass graves. Ancient history, you might think. But read the headlines today. We’re still killing one another on a mass scale. You’d almost think we enjoy it. You’d almost think it was okay.
It’s not okay.
But wait just a minute.
Are there circumstances in which it’s okay to kill someone?
One day a friend of mine who happened to be a black belt in Karate explained to me the difference between “social” versus “asocial” violence. When confronted with what my friend referred to as “social” violence, you’re not supposed to use any more force than is absolutely necessary. If somebody punches you in the head in a street fight, it’s not okay to kill them, because they probably weren’t trying to kill you. But acting in self-defense, it is okay to subdue them using the appropriate amount of force.
“Asocial” violence, my friend explained, is different. This is when someone is obviously trying to kill you or your loved ones. In this scenario, it’s okay to kill them (according to my friend) to protect yourself and your loved ones.
But is it really okay? Is it really such a good idea? (Aside from the obvious legal implications.)
What if the person attacking you has friends? And after you kill that person their friends come after your loved ones and kill some of them?
So you and your friends kill some of them in return. And thus begins a cycle of violence that (I think most objective people can easily foresee) will ultimately result in nothing but tragedy and tears.
Even worse, what if you get used to all the killing? Even begin to like it? Consider this passage in Savage Continent, a book by Keith Lowe about the aftermath of World War II in Europe:
It is important to remember that most of the soldiers who committed atrocities had not been psychopaths, but had started the war as ordinary members of society. According to a psychological study of such individuals, in the beginning most had experienced extreme revulsion at the acts they were required to carry out, and many had found themselves unable to continue with their duties for very long. With experience, however, this revulsion at the taking of human life subsided and was replaced with a perverse delight, even euphoria, at their own breaking of moral codes. [Source: Dutton, Donald G. The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence: Why ‘Normal’ People Come to Commit Atrocities (London and Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007)]
Let’s explore this a little further.
Say someone breaks into your home and threatens you and your family. This person is armed, obviously crazy, and means to do you harm. There’s a chance they might kill you. It certainly looks like a case of what my black belt friend would call “asocial” violence.
Very likely in such a scenario you wouldn’t have any opportunity to do anything that wouldn’t get you hurt or killed. You’d be at this person’s mercy. But you’d be pretty pissed off. And what if you got lucky? What if this individual turned their back or let their guard down and you had the opportunity to hurt them? Hit them over the head with a frying pan or something. In such a situation, should you? Should you risk killing them in what would be a fairly obvious case of self-defense?
My black belt friend would say “yes!” Sure, there’s a chance that you could go to jail for manslaughter or something but hey, wouldn’t it be worth it to prevent serious harm to yourself and your family? To not look like a coward in front of them?
What if it wasn’t you who had the opportunity to protect yourself and your family but a police officer? What if the police arrived and engaged the intruder and killed them? Would that be okay if it prevented serious harm to you and your family?
In other words, what if the only way to protect ourselves is to kill someone?
Us or them?
That’s why we have armies and police forces, isn’t it? To protect us. Keep us safe. And sometimes keeping us safe means killing people. Killing people on our behalf. When the state kills people on our behalf, we are tacitly sanctioning those deaths. That’s okay if it’s keeping us safe, right?
I think about former President Obama. He seems like a pretty decent guy. He ordered the raid that resulted in Osama bin Laden’s death and is almost certainly responsible for other deaths as well. I expect he doesn’t regret bin Laden’s death, though others may sit heavily upon him. As far as bin Laden goes, as the man ultimately responsible for 911 and the deaths of thousands, if anybody deserves death at the hands of United States Navy Seals, it would certainly be Osama bin Laden.
It’s starting to sound like it’s okay to kill “some” people under “some” circumstances, isn’t it? And it wasn’t very hard to reach that conclusion, either.
But is it?
Remember the scene in Season One of Breaking Bad where Walter White attempts to reason out whether it’s okay to kill someone? Look where that got him.
Contrast the events of Breaking Bad with Mel Gibson’s film Hacksaw Ridge in which Desmond Doss refuses to carry a gun during the second world war and ultimately saves the lives of 75 of his fellow soldiers (all based on the true story of a real individual). What if everyone in the second world war refused to pick up a gun? Well, there would be no war, would there?
Of course, that would never happen. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which a surprising amount of people are only too happy to resort to violence for one reason or another and there’s no convincing them otherwise. As a species, we can be counted upon to perpetrate violence. We are fascinated by violence, it seems. It even features prominently in what we consider entertainment. For example, I love a good James Bond movie. About a guy who has a “license to kill.”
In between drafts of this essay, I attended an appointment to get some work done on my van. While I was waiting, I passed the time reading. A woman sat down beside me with a book of her own.
“A great place to get some reading done, isn’t it?” she said.
I agreed, and asked, “What are you reading?”
It turned out to be a mystery.
“I love books like this,” she told me. “About murder.”
Have you watched a John Wick movie recently? At last count, the (thankfully) fictional character of John Wick has killed 439 people. Admittedly, his adversaries were all trying to kill him, and it all started by somebody killing his dog (which would certainly piss me off), and yes, it’s all made up and it’s one great stunt after another, but as I watch it (and I have watched the first three installments) I am aware that I would not find any of it even remotely entertaining in real life.
Why is it so disturbingly easy for humans to kill one another? (Maybe not for you and me under normal circumstances but look around you at Russia, the Ukraine, and the Middle East today, and so many other hot spots throughout history.)
To single out just one factor, we have a terrible and unfortunate ability to view members of our own species as something other than human. Someone just has to be different. “Other.” It’s so much easier for us to kill our fellow humans if we consider them less than human. If we come to consider them less than human and we become fearful of them or angry at them or jealous of them and all our friends and neighbours feel the same way it gets even easier. And if we place people in positions of power who promote such vile views it gets easier still.
(Pro tip: don’t place people like that in power.)
No wonder aliens have never revealed themselves to humanity. If I was an alien, I’d be terrified of humans.
In all likelihood, most of us will live out relatively peaceful lives during which we’ll never be put to the test. Although we’ll still be a little bit culpable for state-sanctioned violence, we’ll never actually be forced to take someone’s life with our own bare hands.
If we’re super unlucky, though, a tiny fraction of us might one day find ourselves in a “kill or be killed” situation. Us or them. In which case we’ll be forced to make a decision.
In such a hypothetical situation none of us really knows how we’d respond until confronted by the actual situation. But I can tell you that not everyone will come to the same conclusion.
In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Austrian neurologist, psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote:
“On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return.”
That line gives me pause:
“…the best of us did not return.”
What Viktor Frankl is saying, I think, is that the best of them maintained their scruples. In terrible circumstances, they opted not to use “brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends” to save themselves. Unfortunately, they paid a terrible price for doing so.
Although Frankl doesn’t explicitly say so, I believe that these same people, given the choice, would opt to pay that same steep price rather than kill another human being, no matter the circumstances. And maybe, for a chance to embody pacifism in such a dramatic fashion, to be a human being who refuses to kill a fellow human being, to help nurture a world in which human beings don’t routinely kill one another, it’s a price worth paying.
There is another way to help foster such a world, though. Which is to live in such a way that it never comes down to such a despicable choice. That it never comes down to “us” versus “them,” to “kill or be killed.” To roll up our sleeves and do the hard work necessary to prevent such conditions from arising, at every level, personal, state, and otherwise. By no means am I suggesting that it would be an easy task; for one thing, it would be never-ending. I cannot tell you exactly what such a task would entail. For sure it would require great foresight, wisdom, and compassion. But I can tell you one thing, and that is where to start:
For those of us capable of it (for, clearly, not everyone is) to consciously recognize and hold dear the sanctity of human life.
Every single bit of it.
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This has been the forty-first edition of Assorted Nonsense, the official newsletter of Donovan Street Press Inc.
Agreed. We (or some of us) have taken this “ licence to kill” quite literally, without thought of the suffering, the tragic finality of it all, or it’s inevitable consequences.
One such impact is the effect that killing has on the killer, that is providing he/she has a conscience and not a psychopath. Karma has a way of finding a place to harbour until every action realizes its consequence. It needs peace. Balance. In other words, a killer, whether the killing is justified or not, will suffer internally and eternally until coming to terms with what he/she has done-executing the gravest of sins, that of taking another human’s life.
This suffering often ends up in suicide, or pleading for forgiveness and yes, even more killings. But, oh that tortured soul. I believe all humans are capable of killing (although I could never see me actually doing it) given the right circumstances. Are humans, as a species, not capable of living in peace? Are we not able to be reprogrammed? Is killing each other just part of “who we are”? Like animals? A way of culling the planet?
The tough survive. But as Frankl pointed out, “the best of us are gone”. Let’s not become numb to the psin or the suffering. Let’s love thy neighbour as thyself. Let’s make love.