Our lives are radically affected by the world defined around us.

For a species that had managed to grasp and maintain control of the world through its unchallenged abilities of thinking, it is ironic that human beings tend to do a lot of everything except that. It is a cynical way of viewing a seemingly cruel world with its just as seemingly cruel people. Things are the way they are simply by a set of natural laws we will never come to understand.

To tell you the truth, I think that’s the easy way out of explaining anything that’s wrong with today’s world. A lazy way and, to some degree, even cowardly.

I believe that if you look far back enough and take the time to understand today’s circumstances, you will realize that the roots behind so many of those things that make us lose hope in ourselves are so deceptively simple, that we want to argue otherwise. Perhaps it is because most of us subconsciously believe in ourselves being vastly superior to any other known lifeform on Earth that makes us deny the notion that our sins are a product of basic desires and errors in logic. It’s that same kind of self-centeredness that makes us want to do things that are more efficient rather than morally sound; the overconfidence in humanity’s natural ability to be able to solve problems to the point that it’s synonymous with arrogance.

What better place to start this point than with imperialism?

Imperialism is nothing short of humanity’s most vicious form of political and economic conquest. It holds itself by two pillars: greed and a deluded sense of self-righteousness. Political leaders such as the ones in Great Britain were well versed in the concepts of supply and demand; to expand, you had to have the resources to support said expansionism. They also understood that many resources existed beyond their own boundaries. Like animals, humans have always struggled and fought for resources for the sake of maintaining their own survival, so such a concept wasn’t new to anyone.

Of course, the militaristic influence was necessary to be able to achieve this goal, however, no civilian in their right state of mind would support sending themselves or their family and friends to invade a foreign people they knew absolutely nothing about and risk their lives just so their leaders could achieve their get-rich-quick schemes. So if the truth would not suffice, what then did these men in power use?

God and Christianity.

In the most ironic way possible, the religion that preached tolerance to your fellow brothers and sisters had been bent into a brutal weapon to destroy entire nations. Then, they took it a step further, by abusing the most visible difference between themselves and who were to be abused:

Color.

Their civilizations and cultures are different from ours because they are savage. Their skin is blacker than ours because it is God’s way of stating we are naturally superior to them by blessing us with whiteness. And most importantly, it is our responsibility to curb them so that they too can enter the Kingdom of God with us.

This was the “White Man’s Burden,” as illustrated by Rudyard Kipling. And like a moth to flames, the idea stuck well with the masses.

While we may scoff at the idea today, in all fairness, it is important to understand that the masses would likely not have known better in their times. Back then, when the only exposure people would know of in regards to the Orient or anything of the like was mostly fabricated and romanticized tales of faraway lands, the concept of other races being different from them symbolizing savagery did not seem so ludicrous.

With troops disillusioned with visions of grandeur and holy justice, the imperialists ripped open the stomachs of nations before vomiting their own ideals down their imperialized throats. And these ideals went beyond Great Britain; while the Chinese were being drugged with opium and the Indians massacring each other over small, trivial differences the British supplied them with, the Americans were eradicating an entire indigenous race through legal contracts that the natives would have never understood, the Japanese steamrolled through Asia after their Meiji Restoration, leaving dismembered and raped civilians in their wake, and so on.

Each and every single one of them preached of “liberation” and “accepting the burden of educating their brothers because they loved them.”

They achieved nothing and destroyed almost everything that existed in the places they conquered before they came.

The lies of the few imperialists in power that started it all had consumed the vision of future imperialists and those who followed them. Like children hastily seeking light in their dark rooms, the quiet fears that grew within the blinded became their voice of reason.

If the imperialized cried for their rights and dreams under the sounds of whips, no one would hear them. If the imperialized were brutally tortured simply for who they were, no one would see them. If the imperialized starved to death, no one would care for them. Because they were black.

And, as expected of people with darker complexions, blackness was directly correlated with suffering.

Today, things have somewhat improved with people becoming more aware thanks to information becoming more and more accessible to the common person. While some are still tied to old falsehoods and assumptions, the value of learning before speaking and acting has become more evident than ever.

But... are we really beyond the point of the imperialist mindset?

We judge people every day for the small things we notice or learn of them, even if it’s not intentional. Political beliefs, race, religion, and gender; these things certainly have an impact on the way we interact with certain individuals. And in the worst-case (but very common) scenario, we label people as “good” or “bad” simply by tidbits of evidence or irrelevant details we see in their character or someone else similar to them. Like the imperialists before us, we tend to jump the gun without knowing a single thing about the people we deal with.

Moreover, imperialism still exists, only in more subtle forms. The White Man’s Burden has now focused its sights on the Middle East, interested in perhaps more than just combating the terrorism it had created in the first place through the same exact imperialist process.

This is what I believe to be the “Human’s Burden.” A responsibility that comes with the sentience we take for granted. The thing is though, to some degree, that’s okay.

At least for myself, I believe that people have the right to think what they want of me as I would of them, so long as we give each other the fair chance to learn about each other. The learning is necessary because we are indeed different from each other. It is a beautiful kind of different formed by our unique experiences and upbringings that make us the unique people we are; the same kind that was abused long ago, but not too far for all the wounds to have healed.

Perhaps we honor the successful aspirations of people like Gandhi, Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. because rather than reject themselves having this weakness of judgment, they accept it, and even go as far as to work upon it through kindness and compassion so that their enemies too can hopefully understand.

Following this philosophy would mean always listening to the other side, regardless as to how inhumane they may seem to ourselves.

To place yourself at the same level of any other person in of itself takes strength. It takes strength not to allow your ego and emotion to shatter respect and logic. It is easy to envision yourself always as the hero fighting against evil, but it is difficult to take the time talking to the same “evil” to reach a conclusion that would benefit more people than just yourself.

This is why I believe it is lazy and cowardly to say that this type of interaction between human beings is impossible. War is not the natural state of man; war is the easier and faster solution to getting what you want because fear is powerful.

It is also why reading and learning about other communities of people is now more vital than ever. Consuming the works reflecting the experiences of real people is more than just learning about new words and culture. It reminds us of the common things we all share as humans so we don’t become blinded by false burdens. We all don’t want to starve or fall ill. We all want families and friends. We all want someone to love and that someone to love us back. We all want to achieve our dreams, no matter how ridiculous they may seem to other people. And we all want our children to do the same.

The world responds to which of the two paths we choose. And our lives are radically affected by the world defined around us. But at the same time, we have the power to change those definitions and fight our Burden.

It’s just a matter of whether or not we choose to.