We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.
I spent a large part of my twenties and thirties trying to understand man’s inhumanity to man. How can human beings treat other human beings so badly, so cruelly? How can human beings torture and murder other human beings? What is it about being human that allows us to do this to each other ad infinitum and down through history?
If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.
The war in Ukraine and now the latest war in the Middle East are just part of the continium of human beings treating other human beings callously and despicably all in the name of power, religion and a misplaced sense of being righteous.
Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion.
In the end all that I have learnt is that we are all capable of it, no matter how much we deny it.
It doesn’t matter if you have been the victim at one point, given the opportunity you too can be the perpetrator. We are all susceptible to being lied to and believing the misinformation that is fed to us by those who hold power or are trying to hold power. We all feel confident that out way of seeing the world is right. And so hatred breeds.
Yet Levi reminds us that “compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment…” This is what it means to be human.
This is the one lesson we can learn from history.
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
Extremism fluctuates throughout history, but flourishes when times are difficult. We are currently living in difficult times.
I devoured these books by Primo Levi over a three year period (1998 – 2000) after visiting the Sydney Jewish Museum on the 7th October 1998. They were desperately sad, hard to read, even harder to comprehend. Yet Levi was able to find some positives – the strength of our human desire to live, to survive, to tell our story – our ability to find joy in a sunrise, a smile, a small kindness in the midst of misery.
I wish I could assure Levi (and us) that what he lived through will never happen again. But the one thing that history teaches us is that it will happen again.
Primo Levi (31st July 1919 – 11th April 1987)
The aims of life are the best defense against death.
(This) Authentic Life 