They Know Not What They Do

Think Tank #45

Today I’d like to address one of my favorite passages from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations:

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

Although the arrogant ass that lives inside of me would love to interpret this as “don’t let stupid people bother you,” this is obviously a gross oversimplification.

It’s actually a profoundly spiritual message. It means that we’re all made out of the same stuff, and that the true origin of bad behavior is ignorance rather than malice. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t people with bad intentions, of course. Claiming that would just be naive. It simply means that even the people who are acting with bad intentions are doing so because, for some reason or another, they have come to believe that this is their best option.

It sounds a lot like, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

It’s a good guideline for life. Reminding yourself that you’re only a few bad decisions away from being exactly like the person who’s currently infuriating you is humbling, and does wonders for one’s empathy.

However, there’s one part of the quote I can’t seem to get behind.

We were born to work together—sure, I can get behind that. But what about the next part? To feel anger or hatred, or to otherwise ‘obstruct’ one another is unnatural?

Maybe it’s a translation issue, but I don’t know about this one. Unhealthy, sure, but unnatural?

If this is true, then why do we do it all the time?