Night Thoughts by Wallace Shawn

Author:Wallace Shawn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Current Affairs, ebook
ISBN: 978-1-60846-813-3
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

We need a better world right away, this week. An upheaval is desirable—perhaps it’s inevitable. And yet we’ve learned some things about ourselves over the last hundred years, and that knowledge makes a difference. We can’t ignore the things we’ve learned. If, as a species, we start to find our way, through effort and imagination, toward a different sort of world, certain individuals and groups will find themselves taking the first steps, and one has to hope that they will keep what we’ve learned very much in mind. And the most important thing we’ve learned is that we don’t understand ourselves.

We have to remember the murderer in the courtroom who said, “I don’t know.” We have to recognize that no matter who we are, even if we happen to be people who can honestly claim to have spent our whole lives struggling to create a better and more just world, all the same, we are human beings, and we don’t know ourselves. We don’t understand ourselves. But we do know for sure that other people and all living things need to be protected from us, because we’re very dangerous. We may be unknowable, and it would be insane to trust us.

Even if what we want is a better life for everyone, we have to remember what species we belong to, and we have to watch ourselves very, very carefully.

Taking pleasure in triumphing over others, taking pleasure in having control over others, taking pleasure in telling others what to do, taking pleasure in the suffering of others, taking pleasure in being the cause of the suffering of others, taking pleasure in the death of others, and then, the extra thirty-seven blows that words can’t seem to explain—what response can we have when this creature approaches?

Self-deception, too, we’ve learned, is a thunderingly powerful force in human affairs. No one can hide from it. No one is exempt from it. The ability to believe, falsely, that we know our own motives and that those motives are good, is an affliction that can befall those whose motives were once indeed good just as easily as it can befall those whose motives have always been bad. And just as the possession of wealth or a high status in society makes a person’s engine of self-deception race faster, so too does the possession of power over others, and so too does the use of physical violence.

It seems undeniable that once it begins, violence leads us into some sort of madness, some terrifying maze inside the mind in which we become lost, and we don’t know what’s happening or what we ourselves are doing. In 1945, a group of us dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Various people gave explanations for that. And then three days later, we dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Were there explanations for that as well? It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. I’m saying that the means of violence should not be entrusted to members of the human race.

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