Hong’s Cave

Thinking about the recent tragedy and other violent incidents in the world, I came back once again to a previous subject.

The element of violence in human society (actually, any biological system) is inevitable. It is intrinsic to us, and the only difference is the varying degrees.

The real questions come up when it is of an extreme degree, i.e., killing another. How can one kill another human? The only explanation that I can think of, is that it’s because the perpetrator does not think of the victim as a “human”. Here, this generic term takes a more specific meaning of “who is of one’s own”. For an individual murder case, one can often attribute this to insanity (on an extreme sense, “anger” is an insane state respective to rationality). And it is an insanity to think that the other is not a “human.”

So, in a war, how can one get such a determination to annihilate your enemy who happens to be “humans”? This is especially more perplexing when it involves huge group of people who are mostly sane. But if you look at the governments and the media at such times, their efforts internally consist of such campaigns that are designed to convince its people that the perceived enemy is no “human.” That’s all it’s doing and in that way, you can go out and kill another “human” with minimal guilts.

I’ve come to an unrealistic conclusion that if we had the capacity to know every other people on this world, we would have no lethal violence at all (well, realistically, it can’t be zero, but…). The thing is our mental capacity is such that we can only remember those who are immediate to us. Our memories can only contain those with our immediate associates, and we are rarely capable of thinking about those outside our circles.