Exhale #25: What Buffalo Bill can teach us about saving the world
I did a plant medicine ceremony once where I envisioned myself as several different victims of abuse.
With each vision I felt some of what I imagine they felt (obviously at 1/1000 of the intensity):
A little boy being beaten by his father.
An old lady being mugged on the street.
One of the girls at the bottom of Buffalo Bill’s hole (fictional serial killer from Silence of the Lambs).
Then I imagined myself as Buffalo Bill himself. A voice in my head asked, “What must Bill’s life have been like to create that monster?”
In the movie they say that he had an alcoholic mother, was brought up in several foster homes and was “made through systematic abuse.”
I thought of how much god awful pain he must have experienced in his life to do what he did to other human beings. I felt some aspect of that pain. The terror, the anger, the hurt he must have felt as a helpless child.
That experience has made me wonder what value, if any, there is in having compassion for perpetrators of heinous crimes. And if there is, what about perpetrators of smaller crimes?
Or what about having compassion or seeking to understand people who simply have extremely different views from me?
In his recent podcast with Aubrey Marcus, Charles Eisenstein talks about this and specifically things we deem inexcusable. Things for which there are absolutely no justifications.
He says that any time he notices in himself this extreme level of judgement towards others, he knows that there is something he doesn’t see or understand.
The example he gives is someone stealing your car. Immediately you might think that that is completely outrageous and inexcusable.
But if you knew that he had been molested and beaten by his father and other family members his entire life, that he had a severe mental illness, and that someone just robbed him of all the money he had left would it be more understandable? Not a reason to let him off the hook, but could you understand it and have empathy for him?
This relates to a belief I’ve held for a while that if I were in their shoes, having lived their experiences, with their genetics, I would believe in and do exactly as they do.
From Buffalo Bill, to abusers, to the staunchest republicans, to the most militant left wing activists, to the capital stormers, to the rioters after George Floyd’s death, to the people calling for more lockdowns, to the ones that say the COVID vaccine is a complete sham.
I believe that this type of thinking is the only way through some of our current issues and differences in the world right now.
We must find compassion for others and seek to understand them. We must be able to recognize the part in us that is just like those we despise most. Psychologists like Carl Jung and Jordan Peterson call this shadow work. We must recognize and embrace our own darkness. Only in doing so will we be able to see real solutions for people like Bill rather than just serving up harsher punishment.
We must recognize that opposites exist for a reason. Yin and yang, conservative and liberal, etc. If we steer too far in any direction we become unstable. We need each other and we need opposing ideologies.
We must learn to listen to people, especially the ones that outrage us the most. If we wish to change people’s minds then we must demonstrate through genuine effort our willingness to change our own minds. Give others what you want in return. Not as a quid pro quo act. Not, “I’ll listen to you for 5 minutes while preparing my argument afterwards” but a real, and vulnerable decision to accept that you may not know it all. To open yourself to learning from someone you may feel offended by.