Shakespeare once said, “Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” We think of goodness and badness and often our thoughts of them are wrong due to our emotions, experiences or education that’s hardly distinguishable from indoctrination. When you read history of human atrocities, you learn that those atrocities were perpetrated by humans and not monsters in human form as some of us like to think. We are our shadows, and our shadows are us. To hide behind ideology that helps you to deal with responsibilities of your suddenly corrupt nature is a tempting thing. When atrocities happen, we blame leaders, though masses are the one that kill. Crowds have no minds of their own, they have emotions. Your usual neighbors and friends can turn in a moment against you. Beasts are inside each of us slightly dreaming dreams of darkness, waiting for the right moment to be fully awake, and then evilness happens.
Are we mostly good or evil? Or there are just thoughts of good and evil? Can you teach a child to be evil? Can you swing an adult from the right road into the abyss of hell? Deaths of millions pepper human history over and over again. Mass graves of forgotten lives stays unburied inside each of our soul. I don’t trust humans because I know them too well. After all, I’m one of them. I know how it’s easy to hate. I know how it’s easy to become a bloodthirsty tyrant under the shadow of corrosive ideology. My confidence in humanity has been mutilated by reality with a dream that is too good to be true. We are one step away from violence. Every day of peaceful existence is so rare in human history that we must enjoy it and never take it for granted. Tomorrow might be too late. My mother used to visit me once a year, coming to America. Now the war separated us indefinitely.
I read of concentration camps and how guards were shooting at Jewish kids from their riffles out of mere boredom. I feel sick to my stomach. I could’ve been one of those Jewish kids, or I could’ve been one of those German guards. My luck is just being born later, but who can tell what could happen in my lifetime? I see my home country Russia mobilizing inmates all over from the Russian prisons to send them to Ukraine to kill their literal brothers and sisters. How can I blind myself with goodness of human nature when the country of my father attacked the country of my mother? There’s no way to defeat evilness without discovering evilness within your own heart. Run from those who claim themselves to be kind. Their kindness is just a masquerade for their rotten soul. We all are victims of circumstances, we adapt too eagerly with only one thought in our brain, to survive. We want to live even if others must die. Are those Russian soldiers being evil? Those eighteen-year-old boys who have been brainwashed by state propaganda. We are victims of our time and our leaders. We are hostages of our environments we grew up in. We are eager to judge, and we are too willing to denounce. We don’t care to learn the other side of the story. We never even learn of our own story. On every life, there are hundreds of deaths. On every act of kindness, there are too many acts of evilness. Don’t lullaby yourself with your own goodness. There’s always an ideology as a mind virus is waiting to infect and corrupt the world one more time with millions upon millions of deaths. It’s reality. It’s human nature. Don’t kid yourself. Know yourself.
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