People Not Like Us

screen shot from Patrick Lancaster video from Mariupol on the front lines of the war in Ukraine, 2022 “What a beautiful world it could be, emptied of people.” — Kezia, a character in Ray Nayler’s novel Palaces of the Crow I grew up, as I suppose most of us did in the west, believing that there were ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’. No explanation was needed other than the fact that some people were just ‘evil’. As I got older, I grew increasingly skeptical of this convenient dichotomy, as I started to hear more complex explanations for world and local events, and began to realize the power of propaganda. So I started to believe instead that “we’re all doing our best”, and that the perpetrators of hatred and violence were just misguided. This shift occurred as my views on free will were also shifting in the face of overwhelming, if unintuitive, evidence that we have no free will. My ideological beliefs that we are all, at heart, peaceful and compassionate creatures, and that our hatred and…