Of Mice and Men

Before I begin, let me point out, that I haven't actually read the book by the same name, and it's unlikely that I use the title in the same context.

I actually thought of this while reading an article in the Time magazine, about the various kinds of torture, victims of Madoff's now famous Ponzi scam wanted to put him through. It was interesting to see people, with so much hatred against one person, I've rarely seen such hatred concentrated against one person other than Hitler in my lifetime. The interesting part was, that I had just read another article on jihad and the recent Mumbai attacks. The article ended with the statement that there is a need to enhance education in order to improve people's outlooks and prospects etc. etc. Essentially, nothing that has not been said before. Though most people would say otherwise, I'd say there's an interesting parallel in both the articles. It's that we have these two groups of people, so intent on harming another group, hatred is the common thread. The means of causing the harm are different, which is expected, because of the difference of situations, but the desire is much the same, though the reasons may differ. And the plain fact is, the hatred and desire for revenge is all too prevalent in the world these days, economy being the most common grouse, it's even managed to sweep terrorism aside. The thing is, people advocate educating people to make them stop killing each other. To make them see that killing people is not the solution. But doesn't that assume that killing someone is the worst you can do to them? I mean, I concede that death is bad, even Freud said something about the guarantee of life being one of the basic psychological requirements. But isn't death better than a living hell? Take the Fritzl case for example, I definitely would recommend a death sentence for the father, crimes as heinous as those deserve it, above all law. But the thing is, the father, even in death would get a better deal, the daughter has to live the remnant of her life with the horrors. Sometimes, there are worse things than death. The human mind has limitless power to cause pain just through thought, just as it has power to give happiness and pleasure. Education, for all it's noble deeds, simply moves our means of executing our hatred to some higher level, or rather more "sophisticated" means. Nothing can extinguish the inherent hatred in us. Which brings us to the quandry, who's worse, the jihadi who massacred hundreds in Mumbai and left many harrowed families to grieve, or the man who stole so many people's life savings and left them penniless. I don't think there's a correct answer, both are bad deeds. After reading about his life story, I have some amount of understanding why he did what he did, though under no circumstances does it justify what he did, poverty can make people do amazing things. To me, what makes the jihadi's deeds reprehensible are not as much the people he killed, but rather the people left alive who were related to those dead people. Living in grief is probably worse than death, or so I feel. Madoff, we can say, acted without any such pressing needs, maybe he did, I don't know. To some that makes him the worse criminal. The only thing I can say is that, in spite of the superiority we claim over mice despite sharing ~95% of our genome with them, we may not be the better creatures. Go figure.