If we don’t believe in reform, evolution and progress of the humankind, we may as well advocate mass genocide! After all, no other species has so far been more destructive and dangerous to the whole life and its entire sustainability on Earth.

Each group of humans have always worked under a dual code of ethics: “be good with us and be nasty with them”. What sets any group apart is their definition of “us” and “them”. For the most intolerant groups (Islamists, Communists and Fascists) “us” is a small circle of believers, comrades and Aryans. For the most liberal and humane, “us” not only includes all humans but also animals, plants and nature.

Hope for reform and progress is what makes most of us have any faith on the future. Otherwise, the specter of constant violence between groups with escalating wars and waves of terror, using more and more sophisticated weapons and ruthless tactics, only appeals to the most savage aspects of our psychology.

So the enemy is “us” and the friend can be “them”, if we can carry on with the act of reformation and evolution, through enlarging our circle of friends and becoming more and more inclusive and cooperative, despite the core savage psychology inside every man that wants to tear every other man a new one.

What sets us apart is not our drive to success and victory that is natural to all of us, but what we do as victors and how we behave towards the fallen enemy. Do we bulldoze their historical architecture and build mass graves instead, like ISIS? Do we construct Gulags and mass murder millions like comrades? Do we confine “them” to ghettos and apartheid and drain life and hope from their souls, like the Israelis? Do we build the Aryan dreamland, complete with Crematoria and gas chambers, like the Nazis?  

The choice has always been ours: reform and tolerance towards a better future, or fighting to the bitter end like a bunch of poisoned rats stuffed in a shrinking cage.