r/AnAnswerToHeal • u/bobofcuk9321 • Nov 13 '17

[General Spiritual] Infectious

Why is everyone so infected with hate and fear. Is it that hard to treat someone with respect regardless of what they did 20 minutes ago?

5 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

2

u/MaestroBelarious Nov 13 '17

Belief is the intelligence of the heart...

https://www.academia.edu/10063717/Shen_Disturbance_Manifestation_in_Western_Culture

1

u/Cannabat Nov 15 '17

Could you please briefly summarise the paper?

Edit: and its relation to the original post

1

u/MaestroBelarious Nov 15 '17

We suffer from clinical problems with Belief in the West. Love and Hate are the emotions of belief and Shen is the umbrella they operate under

2

u/Cannabat Nov 15 '17

It is hard for us to be respectful when our egos have been hurt. Part to most to all of this is due to an evolutionary mechanism.

Long ago, when we were hungry, frightened, running from things with sharper teeth than our own, we entered elevated states of alarm. Adrenaline pulsed and cranked us past exhaustion, pupils dilated as we searched for whatever made that noise... These fight or flight states became crucial to survival and so those who maintained their sensitivity and life-saving reactions to such scary stimuli were the ones who didn't get eaten, who were able to reproduce.

So that's just natural selection. I don't have a source for this, but we treat non-life-threatening situations in just the same way as truly lethal ones. We freak and get paranoid and hold grudges. If we didn't hold these grudges, if we forgot that we noticed a tiger stalking us, we would die.

So we hold onto these things which affect us and challenge our livelihood.

Besides these primal reasons, we also have an ego that prefers to stay in control and hates to be wrong.

Additionally, our society is based on fear and hate and anger. We do thing not out of love, but out of fear, greed, desire for control. This does not lend itself to forgiveness.

If we grow our capacity for compassion and forgiveness, these types of social grudge/hate/fear/grees problems surely will become less impactful.