Quote Serp:
That's a crock. Who gets to actually create their own environment? And if this were the case, who would deliberately create themselves into such an environment? We never completely know what the consequences of our actions are.
Quote Serp:
I created every piece of my reality. It spreads right across this World, and beyond. It even has room for this place, and everyone in it. And their realities.
Blue:
Yeah, I was wondering if someone would pick up on that. One of them is clearly hyperbole, and appears to contradict the other. But I stand by both statements. Realities encroach upon each other all the time, and while we create our own realities, we are certainly not always in control of what we create. Have you never made a poor decision that threatened to bring everything crashing down around you? Or fallen victim to the unseen consequence of a decision that may have been made with the best of intentions? I know I have. Still do, in fact.
But what struck me with your statement is how quick people are to de-humanise others whose realities impinge upon our own. The junky who breaks into your car so he can smoke another rock is fundamentally the same as the rest of us, just living with the consequences of poor decision making. Even as he sneaks off with your stereo under his arm, he is still in the game. He's just rapidly running out of options that the rest of us maybe take for granted.
Take DM's story, for instance. He admits when he was younger, to being a a robber of cars. His motivation was partly money, but mainly self gratification. It obviously worked for him, because he was pulling 2k a monrth. (A lot of money back then) but (I presume) he no longer does this to get what he wants from life. He gets his gratification in other ways. That's a lesson learned, however distasteful the method may have been.
However, let's imagine that at some point, he was caught in the act, and served a couple of years in a Penitentiary, where he learned a few lessons that were not part of his original gameplan.
How different would this man be today?
Lessons like incarceration and 'Justice' often break people, and leave them with considerably fewer options in their wake. Prison can leave scars on a man that never heal, effectively colouring his life for many years after his release. But to Judge someone, and condemn him to such a fate, we first need to de-humanise him. To see him as some kind of lesser being. Like a "human cockroach". Sounds like such a small and inconsequential thing, I know, and the consequences of your statement are probably not going to ruin anyone's life, or change anyone's reality to any great degree.
But think about this. The guards in WWII Death camps were just ordinary men. Men like you and me. Men who loved their families, had children of their own, aspirations for a better world, yet here they were, loading their fellow men into gas chambers day after day. Okay, they 'made their own realities' too, but to what extent were they caught up in someone else's?
What were the lessons they needed to learn here? Were they victims of circumstance? Or Evil men? If there had been no Nazi's, would these men have taken such a dark road in their lives? Been the monsters we like to think all such people are? Of course not.
All I'm saying, is that their moral breakdown, began when they allowed themselves to begin de-humanising others. For the sake of what probably seemed like an easier path at the time.
Some of these men are still alive. Still living with the scars from those times. As are some of their victims. Are the things that they did back then still colouring their lives today? To the same extent as they colour the lives of those surviving unfortunates on the other side of the wire? After all this time, I would have thought so. Wouldn't you?
And that whole dark episode of our history all started when someone decided to de-humanise a whole set of people, probably by some small, seemingly inconsequential insult, like 'human cockroach'.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming you for the last Holocaust, or setting you up for the next one. Just trying to point out some of the ways that, for better or worse, we really
do create our own realities. And like I said, mine really does have room in it for everyone else's, because (and this is important) I realise that other people's realities are as relevant to them, as my reality is to me. By casually attacking their reality, I run the risk of considerably weakening my own. Where our realities meet, is common ground, so it's important not to destroy those places, simply because of some false, moral indignation. After all, I might need to stand there someday too.
