Transcription
When someone is mean to us without good cause, pushes us away cruy in love or bullies us at work, gossips about our children or steals our money, we are in pain, of course, but also to a vexing extent. We are reduced to dire puzzlement. Why on earth did this happen? Why is someone like this? What's up with human nature? The questions add a whole new layer of suffering.
It's to assuage these haunting questions that we can turn to a simple sounding dictim. All cruelty is in the end inherited. The meanness that we witness around us in the here and now, in the shops, in boardrooms, in bedrooms, and online forums, is always by a law of psychological economy something that's been with appalling diligence passed down from one person to another.
The ugliness that washes up on our doorsteps today will be a legacy of ill treatment, violence, selfishness, hard-heartedness, cynicism, and indifference that came somewhere offstage from an angry father or a vindictive mother, a rageful great aunt or a sexually abusive uncle who themselves were handed the corruption by a perverted grandfather or alcoholic grandmother all the way up the generations to our earliest ancestors in the Rift Valley or the Garden of Eden.
We can look out across our world for these complex chains of inheritance. One child is bullying another in the school corridors because someone has been mean to him back home. A friend opts not to step up to help someone because at a key juncture their mother remarried or their father disappeared from their lives.
We may not be able to know exactly what happened to the person who is shouting at us in the shop or denigrating us to a colleague. We may never have the particulars of the fathers who beat them or the mothers who sidelined them, the homes that brought them no comfort, and the nights that ended without consolation. But once we know the underlying structure, the logic will at least be clear.
We can know from the extent of the fighting, the wars, the alcoholism, the pettiness that humans have been gifting each other these parcels of hatred for a very long time. Indeed, he took out his eye because someone took out his leg. She stole their land because someone made off with her heart. They're killing their children because someone butchered their great-grandparents.
We don't have to confuse such explanations for forgiveness. None of this denies accountability. Everyone has a power and therefore a duty to stop their inheritances. We can appreciate with new strength what an extraordinary achievement it is whenever a person who's been the recipient of cruelty is able through imagination and moral discipline not to hand on the agony to anyone else.
When a young man who's been belittled by his father manages to be kind to his children. When a young woman who's been taunted by her father doesn't torment her suitors and one day turns into a patient and kind-hearted partner to a vulnerable man. We can appreciate a knew what true alchemy it is to turn meanness into kindness. To have been the recipient of abuse and yet to say this stops with me to use suffering as a furnace in which to generate love. This is the single largest opportunity any of us will ever have to change the course of history.