A Look back at Morality, six years later
Joshua Chen
Black and White.
A light switch, flicked on and off. White and black. A child, standing alone in his room, in a trance, hypnotically watching the lights as they flicks on and off, dark to light, earbuds on, listening to music that drown out what other people tell him.
In my 17 years of living, one of the most intriguing things I’ve found about humanity is our capability for mastering so many different things . Some of us are scientists, some are students, some are artists, and some of us are businessmen/businesswomen.
Every person on the planet is so different in so many ways, and yet so similar. We react the same way to a horrific incident, we eat the same food, we drink the same water, we cry the same tears when a horrific accident happens, and we feel the same feeling of flow that makes us want to pursue the things we truly love.
As much as we would like to think we’re different from the other people who commit actions that we would never endorse, the truth is that we are all rooted and connected by a basic principle, a principle that drives today’s endless heated debates about politics and just life in general.
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For my middle school self, everything was as simple as a light switch. A sea of difference separated me from other people, and it made it hard for me to understand other people. Not only did I only think this, I also resorted to violent actions when people couldn’t understand me. When I forgot to do my homework assignment, I’d tear it to pieces right in the middle of class, screaming and running to the nearest bathroom. In seventh grade I hit a kid over the head with a calculator multiple times and so hard to the point that he almost got a concussion. I pushed a girl down to the ground for the pure reason that I was frustrated during a basketball game.
I was socially awkward, weird, and aloof. It would often feel like people would talk behind my back, that I was the emotional kid who’d storm out during class and the kid with bad personal hygiene and sometimes would skip lunch in favor of sitting in front of a computer screen and scrolling through Twitter or Reddit.
In the midst of this stage of life, when I started turning more inward and antisocial, I started pushing the boundaries of my own philosophy. While it was still very apparent that I was still immature morally, the more I thought about things, the more things started clicking for me. Emotional boundaries that I had held for so long started disappearing, new boundaries started forming, and I started finding myself relating and sympathizing with people that I’ve never met, understanding messages behind stories that other people didn’t.
It was during my experience of challenging my boundaries where I learned to “read” people, to understand them mentally and emotionally, and use those experiences to predict the action one would do next, or use those emotions to feel the rush of passion that could drive home the point of a strong argument.
And while I was at a high point mentally, a place where I was constantly exploring new themes, growing, and learning new things, I was driven by something. And while that something was inspiring and powerful, it was also something that was corrupting, evil, and drove a flaming rage I’d spend hating people for the next 5 years for.
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You’ve felt it before. The annoyance and anger when things don’t go according to plan. The thrilling feeling when things do go according to plan and everything falls into place. The energy that flows through you when expressing your strong opinions about something.
Emotions are the idea that influence our every decision: we choose McDonalds over home cooking because we Feel like it. We listen to sad songs at night because we feel melancholy and upset.
They’re the idea that drives what I write. Writing with emotion and passion to a point where it is able to connect with people with similar ideas as mine and have people understand me, and yet, they were the thing that caused my writing to be bland, too over the top and emotional which made it hard to connect to.
My mind was filled to the brim with ideas, like a volcano just waiting to burst with ideas but also no idea how to express them. I wrote with a burning emotion, with a raw flame that had originally led me to beat a guy’s head repeatedly with a calculator, that had made me want to tear up my homework in the middle of class, but It would get to my head until my brain would almost burst with too many ideas and not enough places to write them.
What it resulted in was just controversy and alienation. Instead of getting people to understand, it seemed like more people were more focused on my scathing remarks than the main point I was trying to say, and it angered me. It angered me that people had the nerve to not understand or not try to understand the full capacity of what I wrote. One of the curses of being human is that no matter how strong the emotion we feel, we can’t change the fact that some people will never understand or even try to understand us.
It drove me crazy, knowing this. With my parents, I started running out of the house screaming at the top of my lungs, punching the ground until my hands were bruised and bloodied. Online, I’d deactivate multiple times, and engaged people in totally unnecessary and stupid arguments that only dug my grave deeper. I desperately wanted people to understand, and with no one understanding me I resorted to the same escapist methods that I had always used to deal with problems.
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It came to the point where I was controlled by this burning hatred for everyone. My parents, my classmates, everything I did was the opposite of what they would do, everything I wrote an expression and anger at the situation I was in.
But the only thing that it would do was give me more pain. Pain and passion gave the ideas to write, but at the same time too much could mean alienating my audience and hurting myself more in the process.
I was basically force feeding people my opinions and wondering why I wasn’t getting through. Somehow I understood the ideas of human sympathy and empathy, and yet I acted like people were exempt from the same mistakes that I made.
But I still hold most of the ideas that I had composed in my early high school years, although I’m not as driven by a blinding rage anymore, I also know that most of my ideas were and still are relevant in today’s society; that in order to solve the biggest problems of today, we must first learn to understand them.
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We’re looking for something. There’s always a part of us that’s missing, and that’s the reason why we look toward art to satisfy us. Some people may think that we crave human connection in the midst of the COVID — 19 crisis, some people think that we’re looking for the loving embrace of someone special to us. These are valid points, but at the end of the day, the dream of every person on the planet is to be understood and to be accepted no matter the opinions they hold, the color of their skin, or the gender they identify themselves as.
We find ourselves connecting and getting attached to movies, shows, and characters because of how hard the message of the show resonates with us, how relatable the characters are, and that cathartic feeling of being understood. It’s why we recommend these shows and works of art to other people, in order for others to also feel the same magic, and understand you in a way that you could never say with your words.
Yet in our quest for others to understand us, we often don’t take the time to understand others. No matter how many movies we watch that resonate with us, we either can’t or won’t take the time to apply some of the situations we’ve experienced and emphasize with other people simply because their situation is objectively different.
That’s humanity’s biggest flaw, the flaw that causes countless suicides, misunderstandings, and many of our world problems. We use everything, we argue passionately and we scream at the top of our lungs because we need someone to understand us and yet no matter how loud we scream and how many people our words meet no one is able to understand you until you’re in the middle of a mental breakdown, collapsed in the grass, gasping for air.
This message of understanding evil and villainy is echoed throughout so many unique mediums. Animes with intriguing protagonists that use a tiny 2 millimeter pen to draw the line between goodness and evil like Code Geass, Death Note and Attack On Titan, films with intriguing villains like Joker in The Dark Knight, Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars. Yes, the fact is that they’ve committed terrible acts. Eren’s killed innocent lives, Joker laughed at the face of people dying, Lelouch manipulated and killed thousands in order to reach his final goal, and yet, we understand. These actions are inexcusable, the fact that they’ve killed and done so many horrific actions, but we’re able to reach an understanding with them and get to know them better.
If we can love and adore so many of these polarizing and controversial figures, characters who defy the limits and boundaries of evil and good itself, then why can’t we forgive people for things as small as saying the n-word?
We’re placing these characters on a pedestal higher than regular people, and that’s something that’s quite concerning. It might be the purpose of the film or the show to reflect that and make it so that we’re able to understand the characters, but at the same time the point of them is to help us realize that life isn’t as black and white as we originally see it as.
I think it’s great that we find characters like Joker so intriguing, people like Eren, Lelouch, and Light so well done yet so wrong. It shows that although we don’t condone the actions they’ve done, we do have the ability to understand others, no matter how wrong they seem to be. All it really takes is shifting your vision to see the other side of the story.
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Today, I’m still struggling. There are so many times when I feel annoyed beyond comprehension, unable to understand how anyone could enjoy something, or how anyone could commit an unspeakable action. After all, I am human, and humans are always going to be influenced by emotion, whether I like it or not.
But I’ll always try. No matter the difficulties I’ll always reach out to a friend in need or someone who needs me. I’ll always try and understand the motivations behind people no matter the emotional reaction I get from things. But if we’re able to accept the fact that everyone is the same, that they might not come from the same circumstances but feel the same things that other people do, we might get closer to a world that’s better for all of us.
Humanity won’t ever truly understand each other. But we can always try. Try to make the world a better place, whether you’re white or black whether you’re a racist or a homophobe, a pedophile or an anti-vaxxer, try to understand.
That’s the key to life.
Thank you for reading.
