The Duality Within

I've been thinking. In fact, I have been more than thinking, I've been pondering. And you know how pondering has a way of taking off in all directions, or more precisely all the way down one direction, yielding no other answers than more questions. I tried, though, and I keep trying, because I think this is somehow connected with our long lost purpose in this world. To seek out the answers, no matter how unsatisfying they may turn out to be.

In 2001, my class went down to Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic in order to experience the aftermath of WWII and ezpecially the Holocaust first hand. We visited many of the concentration camps, inclucing Auschwitz/Birkenau, Sachsenhausen and Theresienstadt, and it was truly an experience for life, which really put things into perspective.

I recently watched "The Downfall", or as it's more correctly titled in German, "Der Untergang". What a stunning piece of filmography. I was left contemplating the movie and its historical truths ever since, exactly what drove Hitler, what exactly fueled his intense hatred, and in the end, what exactly had him getting as far as he did, responsible for 6 million killed Jews, and a total death toll of the war passing 50 million lives. It scares me, it genuinely scares me, that one single person is capable of that kind of ultimate, organized evil, and that his entire country stood idly by, even the rest of the world stood idly by for a while, and he managed to spread his twisted, horrendous ideology to far more gullible minds than anyone would ever dream possible.

The whole thing has made me wonder about people in general, human nature if you will. Do we all have something inherently evil inside, a side that is only supressed because it doesn't serve us in the context of a society? Is the human soul also a part of duality, is it too consisting of good and good's counterpart, evil? Time and time again, people have certainly demonstrated that we are creatures of two sides, a hand that in one instant whipes a child's tears can in the moment before have caused them, and this duality seems to be represented in every choice we make. Human duality is bewildering, and I think with good cause. It has been said that what a person is lies not in his words, but the predominant tendency of his actions. Therefore, it seems, we are all walking the fine line between good and evil every day, and once in a while a few of us stray into the dark side of ourselves, either by choice or maybe even predestiny. It baffles me, what happened in the last world war, and I tremble in face of the prospects of what humanity is capable of in the future. We are all capable of such endless good, but sadly enough also its opposite. Despite all this, I believe in humanity, and that we'll one day be able too look back at our common history and see that what we accomplished, small and big, was primarily good, and that our efforts to make sense of the world will eventually pay off.

Just remember that bad thinking kills.

posted by CK @ 06:43