Today, the media were discussing whether Omar Mateen, the perpetrator of the Orlando massacre, was what they called “mentally unstable”—that is to say, insane. Listening to them, I thought to myself, “Well, if actions like that don’t qualify as proof of insanity, I wonder what does?”
At the same time, I understood where the questions are coming from. If we hope to prevent such tragedies, which seem to be occurring with increasing frequency, we need to understand the source of the insanity that fuels them.
Realistically, there’s not much you and I can do to prevent people from going crazy, nor is there much we can do about Isis, to whom Omar Mateen pledged his allegiance. So what can we do?
I believe we are not as powerless as we might feel. First, we need to understand that the disease that afflicted Omar Mateen is one that has plagued our species for thousands of years. Its primary symptom is that it causes us to perceive the world as consisting of good guys and bad guys. No matter what side we’re on, in the grip of this disease, we’ll always be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that ours is the good side, the side favored by God and destined to emerge victorious. No doubt Omar Mateen, too, shared this conviction.
Unfortunately, we humans are extremely susceptible to this disease, which I call us-versus-them thinking. And how could we not be? For over 99% of our history, all humans lived in small tribal groups that were distinct, separate and homogenous. Back then, the world really did seem to consist of us and them. Even then, us-versus-them thinking often led to war. But though war was brutal, it didn’t cause millions of deaths or threaten the future of the entire planet. Today, it does. In our day and age, anyone who incites us-versus-them thinking is playing with fire.
Having transitioned from the tribal to the global era, we now live in a world that is highly diverse and totally interconnected. “Us” and “them” has become a meaningless construct—we’ll either survive as a global community or not at all. Simultaneously, our destructive potential has increased a million fold. Us-versus-them thinking is therefore not only a habit that no longer makes any sense: it’s become a collective disease that is threatening to destroy us.
Unfortunately, it’s so common that we usually don’t recognize it as a form of mental illness until something like the Orlando tragedy happens. Even then, only few people have the courage to acknowledge that what we’re dealing with here is not just a crazy individual or a crazy ideology, but rather a form of insanity that is common to humans around the world.
No question, this is an uncomfortable truth to face. For if what happened in Orlando is a symptom of a deeper problem that affects us all, then we can’t just shove the responsibility on some alien group or ideology. At the same time, to recognize the role of us-versus-them thinking in our world is also empowering because it means we each have opportunities to address the problem, right where we are.
Individuals like Omar Mateen and organizations like Isis show us where us-versus them thinking can lead, when taken to an extreme, Yet if we pay attention, we’ll notice milder manifestations of the same disease in our own back yard. We’ve all heard racial slurs or homophobic jokes. We’ve all heard politicians who speak of their opponents as if they were scum. Millions of Americans are cheering for a presidential candidate who wants to build a wall between the United States and Mexico and is calling for a ban on immigrants from Islamic nations.
If we’re honest, we may even encounter traces of us-versus-them thinking within ourselves. We might not be racists or homophobes, but so what? The “others” could be just about anyone. They could be Democrats or Republicans, loggers, pro-lifers, New Agers, Pentecostal Christians or what have you. We need to understand that the issue is bigger than just homophobia or racism. Serious as those phenomena are, they are merely two heads of a many-headed dragon.
When someone asked the great Indian saint Ramana Maharshi how we should treat others, he responded with four simple words:
“There are no others.”
What if we were to actually live as if there were no others?
What if we started honoring all beings as members of our extended family?
I, for one, can think of no better way to honor the memory of those who lost their lives in the Orlando massacre.
