A reader asks Matt whether it is possible or advisable to love and tolerate everyone, including people who do bad things.  Is there a place for our judgment or even self-righteousness in the face of evil, or must we disregard judgment for universal love?

Matt responds:

You have asked a seminal question, which has to be defined and addressed before we can reach any kind of semblance of peace and understanding in our species.

That’s why I call for a New Los Alamos, where questions such as yours and a myriad of others will be brought up and discussed.

If we leave it to private interpretation, all we have to do is read history, where people thought it was perfectly all right to put people in chains and treat them like livestock, make them work under horrendous conditions, or, if there was an allegation that they had done something wrong, to take people out and hang them just because so-and-so said such-and-such.

Reading our history, we don’t find a lot of tolerance and understanding.  We find a lot of axioms.  The Nazi theme was if we get rid of the Jews and a wide umbrella of other people, the world would be a better place.

We can see where the lines are, but they become difficult to understand when we stand back and look historically at how we treat each other.  These questions are truly the ones that have to be answered.

Every race, culture, small minority, and great majority will have many different answers for all of those questions.

In today’s headlines, we can look at a question such as sexual preference or abortion, and we don’t seem to be able to come to any concensus on those supposedly easy questions.

When we get into even more complex things that we as a species encounter, we have our work cut out for us.  But getting the right forum, the right people, the right time and place, has to be left up to the type of people who took an idea of “Can we build a bomb that can blow up the whole world?” and make such a creation.  They did it.

That caliber of people has to now come forward and say, “Can we find out how—in this scatterbrained serendipity unpredictable wonderful loving joyful stupid killing species—to live together under some semblance of order and respect so that we don’t completely destroy this planet?

Luckily, the animals, insects, and fish, don’t have the same problems.  Possibly they worked them out eons ago and are much further along than we are.

Matt

P.S...When I look at my pool, my natural pond that I have in Ireland with a couple hundred fish, I sit there and think, What if this were the world?

There’d be some fish in the corner trying to figure out how to communicate with others on the other side.  There would be some dressed to the nines, there would be a couple idiots painting with their fines, there would be some trying to steal food away from the others.  It would be a complete world in this pond.

But now, instead, being fish and not the human species, they just swim around eating the food and having a hell of a time.  I often wonder, How do they get to this state of bliss?