A Perfect World

Full disclosure: This blog post is an unplanned, badly structured ramble. Make of it what you will.

In my short twenty-one years of life, I’ve experienced nothing so astonishing, terrifying and frustrating as the machinations of the human brain. Depending on who you ask, the brain is either a bundle of nerves and synapses that muddle together to make a being, a house of memories and emotions too complex for science to grasp, or the ship within which the soul resides. Or all three. Or something else. It may be the most abstract and fascinating physical object within our reach. Everyone has one, and we hardly give it thought. Well, without further ado, here is my brain, examining others.

Looking at the world from a different perspective, we might be a conglomerate of brains piloting sacks of meat that have managed to communicate with each other, and form the illusion of a society. Not only have we ascended from our ancestral tribal qualities (allegedly), we’ve also convinced ourselves that we’ve evolved past the fall of civilisations and live by a strict moral code. Most of us know rights from wrongs, days from nights, self defense from murder. In fact, we’re brought up under the hypothetical wings of our parents who teach us that the world as they see it is the way the world is, full stop, and it’s not for a decade or two that we might begin to question this notion. And we begin to ask ourselves the difference between right and wrong, capitalism and communism, justified war and uneasy peace. The lines become blurred. We begin listening to other sources and slowly, we begin to shape our own opinions on the state of the world and people’s places inside of it.

Now here’s the problem. Somewhere along the way, whilst we were evolving into this society into which we’re born like it’s normality, people’s codes of morals began to divert, or had begun diverted, and led to a string of complicated different spheres of opinion. People on Side A believe that people on Side B are wrong and maybe evil for their opinions, whereas people on Side B think the same of those on Side A. Perhaps they’re both good people. But with each passing generation, the children that are born into the normality of either side’s opinion being true fact believes perhaps more strongly that the opposing side is inherently ill-willed. Those who want immigrants to seek safe haven in this country are clearly fools who have no concept of the wider implications. Those who bar immigrants from entering the country are ruthless human beings with no regard for human life. And so they cook up plots against each other, telling themselves that the means justify the ends because they are right. Those opposing them don’t see that right now, but they are right.

Nobody will ever see the whole picture for what it is. I pride myself on objective thinking where possible, but I often fall to bias and limited perspective, as much as anyone else. People far more learned and intelligent than I may try to think objectively, and fail all the same. Because we weren’t born into neutrality. We were born into a pre-existing world of opinion and lies, and hatred and the greater good, and it’s gotten to the point where this tangled web we weave no longer has a beginning, a starting point to return to and figure the whole thing out, and we’re trapped in it. You can’t please everyone, there’s no such thing as perfection and in a perfect world, there’d be no conflict. But I suppose that’s the price of individuality.

This greatest of moral problems, I think, can be best personified in the World War 2 example. Hitler’s rise to power was catastrophic for millions of lives, and no child even 70 years later grows up without hearing of his malice. And yet he was human, and without his despicable conquest we wouldn’t have many of the advances in technology and medicine that we now do; we wouldn’t have swayed to the philosophy that those alien to our nationality are good, and that the Aryan race is a hideous concept. So having seen the (admittedly, currently clouded) promising future that was left after the downfall of the Nazis, would you go back in time to kill Hitler? It’s the same sort of problem with individuality. With differing opinions and philosophies comes hatred, pain, war, death, but if we were all one, and if we all agreed on every outcome, we’d surely lose our identities, our hopes and dreams, our loves, our souls.

So I ask you: Is a suffering world the only one in which love and laughter can exist?