Why We De-humanize, Other, and Lose our Humanity

As with many Americans, my heart has been heavy after the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Shortly after hearing the news, I stumbled across a café in Chiang Mai run by an NGO whose motto is “No one is free while others are oppressed,” and was struck by the irony and appropriateness of encountering those very words at that very moment on the other side of the world.

In the wake of these killings — on the tails of the 240th anniversary of America’s founding based on equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — and the subsequent deaths of the five police officers in Dallas, one of the recurring questions in my mind has been: how far have we as a society really come?

With the attacks in Istanbul, Bangladesh, and Baghdad also fresh in my mind, the other question I continue to ask myself is: why is it so easy for human beings to lose their humanity?

It’s something I’ve pondered a lot, especially since I ventured into human rights work nine months ago. Whether it’s trafficking someone into prostitution, forcing someone to work 18 hours a day, physically abusing someone simply because you can, or accusing someone of a crime and denying them all due process, how does anyone get to the point where they think it’s okay to hurt another human being, exert control over them, or steal their life from them? Surely this is not in our nature?

Or maybe it is.

I’ve always thought that the ability to take someone’s fundamental rights away must necessarily be coupled with the notion that that person’s life is inherently less valuable than our own. To justify inhumane behavior, we ‘other’ people in our minds, making them somehow less than human.

Maybe this is a relic of our early, survival-focused existence that we’ve failed to shed through the process of evolution and development.

When resources were scarce and one group’s survival was mutually exclusive to another’s, perhaps there was no room for humanity. Perhaps empathy meant a moment of weakness wherein the prey you had been hunting had now become another tribe’s sustenance for a month, and some of your own would starve. Or perhaps such emotions as universal compassion (beyond what we experience for our own kin) didn’t exist at all yet, since if they had, they would have quickly been weeded out in a Darwinian world.

There are some societies today where this survival-of-the-fittest mentality still exists. In poor countries where resources are scarce, or, at least, the wealth of development has not trickled down, empathy and compassion are luxuries that many do not have, particularly when they are concerned solely with their day-to-day existence. Sadly, even the objective view of the value of human life in such societies diminishes in a way that we have trouble processing in the Western world, because death is a much more commonplace part of life.

But for those of us privileged enough to live in societies that have moved so far past the basic goal of survival, where empathy and compassion are not luxuries that we can’t afford, why do we so often cling to primitive notions of survival, scarcity, dehumanization, and othering?

We see this in everything from acts of war, to media coverage of certain events, to racist attitudes. After all, what is at the root of racism but ignorance of the unknown, fear of anything that looks different from us, and, deep down, a vague sentiment that our very survival is being threatened. This is why racism is so pervasive even among distinct minority groups in the U.S. — because of a feeling that we can’t possibly all thrive, so it’s either us or them.

Of course, these views are rarely expressed overtly. Rather, they come out in much more insidious ways, masked in the benign cloths of preference, policy, or law.

Because we know they are primitive.

We know that we as human-kind have evolved well past such primal instincts. We have shifted towards equality, compassion, and the recognition of the fundamental value of every life. But there is still a conflict.

This is why we have needed to create standards to adhere to, to aspire to. Things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Constitution, and the Civil Rights Act. To remind us of the path to which progress has led us.

To remind us that, with development, we have the ability and responsibility to be better, and to uphold what we have correctly recognized as the self-evident truth that all humans are created equal.