Which of the following is a braver act?

• To walk up to a bully, look him or her in the eyes and say “Fuck you”

OR

• To offer a bully your shoulder, your ears, your time and your best efforts to understand
  

What motivates people to “do bad things” has always fascinated me.

Several years ago, during a trip around Europe I visited Dachau which was one of the very first concentration camps opened in Germany during WW2. We took a tour with a guide who insisted on humanising the Nazi’s and citizens who may have known what was going on but did nothing. Interestingly, many of the american tourists were a little taken aback by his approach. Surely these people were just “bad people” who were born to be or were raised to be “evil”.

People really don’t like to think that given the circumstances, they would have also committed the same acts of neglect, ignorance, indifference or heinousness. We like to believe we would have been the voice of reason. That we would have rebelled even knowing it would make you an outcast. This is unfortunately unrealistic as large masses of people can be driven by fear, anger and pain.

After the tour was over we were led to a bookstore. Lots of history books and plenty of biographies by jewish survivors. But that’s not what I wanted. I was more interested in reading the account of a Nazi…

Predictably when I asked the lady working in the store if there were any biographies written by a Nazi she looked at me cross-eyed. It was worth a try! The closest thing I found was ’Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account’ by Miklòs Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jew who was forced to work for the Nazi regime as an experimental pathologist. (Not for the squeamish or the faint hearted)

I was more interested in understanding where the evil came from…

I always have been curiously drawn to this...

I’ve always believed that there is no such thing as pure evil. But evil is in our nature. We all have demons. Some of us let our demons run wild, while others try to suppress them. We all wear masks. These masks hide our vulnerabilities. When we fear this mask will be removed against our will and our vulnerabilities revealed we turn to our demons for help. Our demons make it impossible for anybody to reach in and touch us. We use them to lash out and push anybody who tries to help us away. We push them away because we believe we know better than they do.

We can’t be saved.

Often when somebody lashes out at you it can be difficult to brush it off as something that wasn’t personal. Part of the abuse might be personal attacks, but the intent of the attack probably has nothing to do with you as a person. It’s difficult to say what purpose there is to hate.

What need does it fulfill?

Although it may not have a logical or rational purpose, there are reasons behind abusive tendencies. We often like to think these reasons come from a place of inhumanity. It’s quite possible that this perception comes from how we learned about “evil” growing up. Through stories on the television or movies we are often presented with a non-human character to represent the villain of the story. In fact when the character is human, they are often foreign to western civilisation, or to the US such as the use of German or Russian accents for example.

This sense of ‘otherness’ we get from a very young age means that our egocentric bias doesn’t allow us to relate to evil or villainous behaviour. We cannot empathise with evil because we believe we ourselves are incapable of evil and we can look down on villains from our personal pedestals.

Step down from your pedestal…

This week I gave my time to somebody who is perceived badly by many people. This is not without reason and he knows this. We talked, and I listened and gradually as he opened up I began to understand where he comes from. It seems it isn’t easy for most people to shut off their own needs for a moment to absorb the burdens of a stranger, especially one who appears to want to cause pain to others. It isn’t easy for me either, and I won’t pretend I am strong enough to do this with anybody. There have been times I had the opportunity to give my shoulder to somebody who hurt me badly in the past and I was incapable of letting him in. Those wounds are still prone to being re-opened.

It is a courageous act to bare your heart to somebody who pushes people away by lashing out with anger or hate. These people often come from a place we all know, but they know better than we do.

A place of pain.

Those who push people away need somebody to listen more than anybody. Broken hearts can get buried so deep that it’s hard work to dig it back up again. But it’s there somewhere.

I consider myself an emotionally strong person. I’m sorry that I’m not strong enough to sit with those who have truly hurt me in order to push me away. But I try to fight my own trust issues. Perhaps this wasn’t a completely selfless act for me because I feel stronger having reached this person on an emotional level. And I enjoyed my time with him. Still, I consider compassion for those we perceive as our enemy to be too rare.

Please try to see people for people. No matter how hateful.

See them. Then sit with them. Then listen.

You don't have to take their abuse. But if you draw some boundaries through which they can reach you when they need an ear, you’ll never know what you could gain.

(Native speakers only.

Google translate not permitted)