“I took no notice when I heard some horrible voices, when I saw the house beside me was burning, when I found the people struggling hard to stop the fire. I took no notice for the burning house wasn’t mine, for my beloveds were safe, for I was so far from the fire. I took no notice as the fire started spreading around, as the smoke got thicker and thicker, as it got closer to my house and could burn it too, I still took no notice. Since I didn’t think it could reach my house, since I thought it to be controlled, since I didn’t think it could be so horrible, I again took no notice. Now my house is burnt, now I have lost all my loved ones, now I am all alone, now I notice, I notice. But it’s too late.”
The self-destructive megalomania and egotism will dehumanize man and empty him of virtue and moral values. Nurturing selfishness, one would be highly indifferent to the challenges, pain and suffering of his/her next door neighbors. One’s apathy about the anguish of a mother saddened by the death of her child, about the wounded heart of a violence victim, about the starvation of the poor, etc. relegates him/her to a heartless being.
The bitter tears of an honor killing victim, the oozing blood of a wounded body, the heartrending sobs of an anguished individual, etc. can no more shake one’s conscience or force tears into one’s eyes. It is believed that altruism and humanity are in a moribund state and moral values are on the verge of erosion. Therefore, we take no notice of “horrible voices” and of the burning house sending up a huge cloud of smoke.
Charlie Chaplin writes to his daughter Zheraldin, an actress, “And look at people’s lives, the lives of those street dancers in the final quarters to play hungry and shiver and beggary. I was like them …. It more than forty years I laugh people on earth. But I cried more than they are brave, Zheraldin.... In the world in which you live, there is only dance and music! At midnight, when leaving the great hall you forget richest fans, but do not forget to ask a taxi driver who takes home to his wife … if no money to buy a coat child, you put money in his hand….”
We never take notice of the dancers, singers and thespians who perform on an empty stomach, not for pleasure, and of those comedians who “laugh people” with bleeding heart – as Charlie did. We do not notice the hungry women who succumb to the desires of salacious men to save the life of her children – this decadent lifestyle is almost rampant. Humanity and kindness seem to turn meaningless with each passing day.
The violation of rights and dignity is rife across the society. One simply tramples upon the rights of his/her fellow citizens to gain self-interests. In other words, religious beliefs and ethical codes are surpassed flagrantly and human values are at its nadir. For instance, a child is molested or a modest girl is raped either to avenge her brother/father’s acts or to satisfy the sinister desires of a salacious man, a woman’s character is besmirched just to burn her up and one’s blood is shed to henna the hands of rabid individuals.
We have no immediate experience of what other men feel. We can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation.
It should be considered that, “To pursue your own interests is prudence; to pursue the public interest as well is piety; but to pursue your own pleasure by depriving others of theirs is injustice. On the other hand, deliberately to decrease your own pleasure to augment that of others is a work of humanity and benevolence, which never fails to reward the doer over and above his sacrifice.”
We have to revitalize humanity and the spirit of brotherhood through practicing moral standards. It is rightly said that: the love that is to be born out of hate will never be born. Hatred is sterile; it breeds nothing but the image of its own empty fury, its own nothingness. Love cannot come of emptiness. It is full of reality. Hatred destroys the real being of man in fighting the fiction which it calls ‘the enemy’, for man is concrete and alive, but ‘the enemy’ is a subjective abstraction. A society that kills real men in order to deliver itself from the phantasm of a paranoid delusion is already possessed by the demon of destructiveness because it has made itself incapable of love.