What if there are no Evil People after all?

Why are people so hateful these days?

Have you ever asked yourself this question at least once in your life?

I have.

Maybe you remember that article.

But let me ask you another question as well.

What if there is even the smallest possibility that you and I are not as separate as we think?

I do not mean that we share the same skin, hair, or eyes. That would be trivial. I mean something deeper. What if, in some way we do not yet understand, we share the same essence? The same soul. The same consciousness looking through different windows.

Maybe you are simply me in another lifetime.
Or perhaps I am you.

I know many people would dismiss such an idea immediately. There is no proof, they would say. And they are right. But there is also no proof that reality is exactly what they think it is. There are still vast parts of existence that none of us truly understand.

So let us imagine, just for a moment, that there is even the tiniest chance that this could be true.

If that chance exists, no matter how small, then something strange follows.

Every word we say against another person, every harmful thought, every cruel action would not only be directed outward. It would also be directed inward. In a deeper sense, we would simply be fighting ourselves… over and over again.

Yes…

We often think badly of one another.

We assume the worst.

We react instead of understanding.

Take a simple example:

Imagine a man, let’s name him “D”, who works for another man, called “J”.

“D” begins to believe that “J” dislikes him. Perhaps he thinks “J” is unfair, manipulative, and secretly trying to rob his money by not paying out the hours “D” has worked until now. He also starts thinking that all bosses must be like this and that life seems unfair because of employers who take a huge profit because of their staff. These thoughts slowly grow inside “D’s” mind until they feel like certainty.

But the truth might be very different.

“J” may simply be overwhelmed with his own problems. Like for example paying the dues of the company, responsibilities to carry, worries that keep him awake at night. Perhaps “J” barely even has time to think about “D” at all.

Yet “D” begins to act according to the story he has created in his own mind.

He starts to speak badly about his boss “J”. He does small things behind his back. He behaves with suspicion and hostility.

But one day eventually “J” discovers “D’s” behaviour.

Now “J” reacts. He becomes stricter, loses his trust in “D” which leads to him receiving less important tasks… mostly repetitive routine work. “D” begins to see this as confirmation of his assumptions which leads him to more disrespectful behaviour which finally pushes “J” to take a hard but necessary decision that he cannot keep someone like “D” in his company any longer.

So “J” fires “D”.

And in that moment “D” feels completely justified.

“You see?” he says to himself and to others as well which he might have already influenced with the same thinking…. “I knew he was a bad person.”

But what truly happened is that “D” created the very reality he feared. By assuming harm, he produced harm. By acting with hostility, he invited hostility. In the end, the person he damaged most was himself.

And this small story repeats itself everywhere.

Between friends. Between families. Between nations.

We assume the worst in each other, and then we act in ways that slowly turn those assumptions into reality.

It is a strange tragedy of the human mind.

Now imagine something else for a moment.

Imagine that instead of investing all this energy in suspicion, anger, and conflict, we invested it in helping one another…

…I wonder…

… what would the world look like?

Would it really be boring? Or would it be extraordinary?

Imagine the things we could build together. The ideas we could create. The worlds we could shape if cooperation replaced hostility.

Yet so often we choose the opposite.

We chase status. We chase superiority. We cling to the narrow vision of “I am above the rest.” We feed the ego which drives us against the wall.

Yes, having more can create the illusion of strength. Power can make a person feel superior. But if we are honest with ourselves, many people who climb the highest ladders still feel a strange emptiness inside.

A quiet void.

So if you have already noticed… this is not really about hatred at all.

It is about projection.

Humans very often project their own fears, insecurities, or assumptions onto others. And then they begin reacting to that imagined version of the other person. The tragedy is that those reactions can slowly transform a person into exactly what he feared all along.

A strange loop, isn’t it?

No matter if strangers, friends, families, companies or entire nations… we all do it.

Fear creates behaviour.
Behaviour creates reaction.
Reaction confirms the fear.

And the cycle closes. A cycle of reaction feeding reaction, until suffering keeps reproducing itself. Then the void grows. And so we try to fill this void. With possessions. With status. With more ego.

In Buddhism this is called the Bhavachakra, the Wheel of Becoming. It represents the cycle where ignorance leads to craving, craving leads to action, action leads to consequences, and those consequences create more ignorance again. Around and around it goes.

The frightening part is that the cycle sustains itself. Once people are convinced of their narrative, every new event becomes “proof” that they were right. That is why breaking the wheel is so difficult. It requires one person in the chain to do something extremely rare…

To not react in the expected way.

Someone choosing understanding instead of retaliation. Someone interrupting the loop.

So what if for an instant we imagine something different…

Imagine sharing what you have with those who have less. Coming down from that lonely mountain top to enjoy a football game in the dirt, together with the rest of the crowd.

Or when you hear that dark evil chatter inside your own mind… imagine offering kindness, even when none was expected at all.

Imagine we would ask that big “Why” behind thoughts, words or actions. To understand each other better instead of assuming lies our own mind creates.

Have you ever considered what might come back to you?

Gratitude.

Warmth.

Respect.

Love.

These things have a strange power. They tend to fill the very emptiness people try to escape. And by imagining that the other person might not be an enemy at all, you introduce doubt into the mechanism that keeps the wheel spinning.

And doubt, yes, even doubt, can at times be very powerful.

Because once a person truly wonders “what if I am wrong about this person?” the wheel begins to slow down.

And when the wheel finally stops… it breaks.

In truth, it has to break.

It may be humanity’s only real chance.

Yes, we might have incredible technology, intelligence and creativity. Yet most large problems in the world are still versions of the same ancient cycle of fear, projection, retaliation, and confirmation.

Break that cycle and everything else becomes easier.

Fail to break it and we keep repeating the same story, just with better machines. Until maybe one day there is nothing anymore to repeat because we destroyed everything.

The interesting thing is that the wheel never breaks on a global level first. It always breaks at the smallest scale.

Inside one mind… Between two people… In a single moment where someone decides not to continue the pattern. That is how cycles end.

Slowly, quietly, then… the change spreads. And we begin to heal. You know what happens when someone heals? When a person starts healing themselves, something else begins to heal as well.

The world around them.

Because remember that small possibility we considered earlier?

That you might be me. And I might be you.

If that were true, then we would not be many separate beings fighting for survival.

NO!

We would be one vast, eternal consciousness dreaming itself into countless lives.

Learning through each other.

Hurting through each other.

Healing through each other.

Growing through each other…

Of course, this is only a thought.

But thoughts have a curious nature.

Many things that were once considered impossible began as nothing more than an idea someone dared to imagine.

So who knows.

Maybe reality is far stranger than we think.

Maybe everything is true in its own way and nothing false really exists.

After all, even truth itself might simply be relative to the eyes that perceive it.

If you look back at our story with “D” and “J”, the conflict did not begin with cruelty. It began with something as simple as a story inside someone’s mind that hardened into certainty. So, here we see what characters like that one very famous dwarf or even that one very famous clown once hinted at: the most powerful thing in the world might simply be… a story.

Anyways.

What I want to say is not that harmful actions don’t exist, but I question somehow whether we truly understand where those actions really come from. If you look at all the problems on the world wide scale which still have no solutions by this moment, it may be because someone kept feeding an ego instead of being still for a moment, try to breath deeply and ask the right question.

That’s a very different thing.

And so this brings me to the final thought that perhaps the world is not full of evil people after all. Perhaps it is only full of evil assumptions that slowly turn people into what we feared they were.