What's it all about? My feeling is that it's very important that everyone enjoy living; not that I enjoy it at the expense of you, or you at the expense of me or someone else. That we all enjoy it. Although this idea resembles utilitarianism, which is often snubbed by those who want to have a "deeper" basis for their morals, even most people who want to rest their values on religious principal recognize it anyway, either through the notion of Good Samaritanism (making someone else happy or helping them through a time suffering and need) or through the notion of themselves receiving a later reward even if it is after death. We all want to be happy in the way (pattern of living) that we have learned. Many of us are too attached, however, to that pattern; instead of simply trying to exist in the way we have found, we try to make others live the same way (propagate the pattern) or try to destroy their alternate ways of living (cause the extinction of competing patterns). My belief, however is that the most important aspects of any way of living, or cultural/religious/moral pattern of society, is compatible with coexisting with other patterns, so long as those patterns adopt a similar attitude. Most of us are dealing with similar patterns of existence, trying to get through our lives on Earth; if there is a god and only one god, then it is the same god we are dealing with as well. In fact, even an atheist would be dealing with the same god and might even be seen not so much as denying the existence of God, but as merely refusing to use the same metaphor as everyone else, since we are all finite beings trying to explain the same existence from differing understandings and points of view.
So why do people from different walks of life fear each other? There are a number of reasons that come to mind:
1. Another's way of life tends to contradict one's own. It is not just that the beliefs or lifestyles are side by side within the world, which may be enough to trigger cognitive dissonance leading to paranoia, but that the alternate set of ideas may have some attraction to one's community and family, which could cause behavior oneself, one's family, or one's community would consider inappropriate, even criminal or schismatic. It might be feared that this will happen more or less through osmosis, or perhaps even because of proselytization by the other group.
2. The other group may actually wish the extinction of one's own group (ethnic or religious "cleansing") or the patterns of one's own group (proselytizing), or this may at least be feared.
3. One may wish one's own way (pattern) of life to become totally dominant, out of a combination of the escalation of these fears and being convinced that one's own way is totally the right one, and all the other ways are bad.
Note that by writing a blog and by trying to convince the reader of certain things, I too am trying to propagate patterns from my existence; I am trying to "provive", make my patterns, or the ones that I find valuable to the survival of my community, survive and propagate themselves, in the sense of a previous entry to this blog. But in this, I am no different from almost anyone else. (It is conceivable that from time to time someone might commit suicide in order to remove their own patterns from the world; but in most cases, suicide also involves making some sort of a point, in other words, propagating a thought pattern.)
But reasons 1-3 above, I believe, are generally rooted in paranoia. Once a group becomes paranoid and becomes a threat to others, then the fears of the other group become more legitimate, and the cycle spirals into an antagonistic pattern that is harder to break. Since this has already happened across the world for centuries, the question becomes, can we break the pattern?
The first step in breaking the pattern, or in any project, is understanding the problem. In human affairs, understanding, particularly if it is mutual, can do more to dispel many problems than one might think. Many people believe in deeds over words and thoughts. But in people, words are actions, and changes in thoughts quickly influence other less ephemeral actions as well. So if we can understand that our fear of each other is rooted in paranoia, and prove to each other that we both understand it, we can begin to trust each other with our differences, knowing that we are also the same in being human and wishing to survive and thrive in happiness.
What I am trying to do here, and what many other peace activists have attempted to do over the years, is basically inject a small pattern into the overall pattern of human existence, like a small strand of DNA into a cell, to make the organism heartier. This can be a risky practice, and in fact I am rather opposed to most gene splicing. But at the same time, every act is a modification of the pattern, and everything we do in a world with a chaos of causalities (everything effecting everything else, directly or indirectly) is a risk. In most cases, I think that speaking one's mind is a positive risk -- even if you are wrong, someone can correct you, and it is known what sorts of patterns of thought are out there. (In the case of gene splicing, I think there is often less to gain and more to lose, with a greater overall risk, compared to talking. But that is a different discussion, which I am only forced to touch upon here by the analogy, which is meant to be illustrative. Another analogy might be to a module of code into a computer program, that positively influences the overall function. Perhaps this is a better one.)
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