Beyond Us vs. Them: What Wars, Hate & Assassination Reveal About Humanity

0:02 Before the Nazis built gas chambers, they started with words. Step by step, sentence by sentence, they erase the humanity of Jewish people. And today, the same kind of language is being used against the Middle East. Roger, Charlie were ready to rock. A sniper doesn't see a person through their scope. What they see is wind speed and trajectory calculations. So what links the battlefield? A sniper's bullet and the quiet disdain for humanity itself. It is not violence. Plenty of violence happens between people who see each other as fully human.

0:50 It's something more insidious, much more fundamental. It's the moment when a person becomes a problem to solve.

1:09 We're supposed to be the species that invented empathy, storytelling, and soup kitchens. Yet we're also uniquely gifted at making other humans disappear, not just physically, but conceptually. We can look at another member of our own species and genuinely not see a person there anymore. This isn't about good people versus bad people. Recent research shows dehumanization occurs symmetrically during conflicts. Even disadvantaged groups dehumanize their oppressors. It's a psychological Swiss Army knife that apparently every human carries, just waiting for the right circumstance to unfold.

1:53 Wars don't start with bullets, they start with pronouns. It is about they they become fundamentally different from us. The language shifts to animal terms, cockroaches, rats, vermin, parasites, and suddenly carpet bombing makes perfect sense to people who wouldn't step on an actual cockroach without actually feeling bad about it. What the fuck? The Rwandan genocide didn't begin in 1994. It began years earlier when radio broadcasts started calling Tutsis in Yanzi meaning cockroaches. Japanese propaganda during World War 2 depicted Americans as demons and beasts.

2:35 Confederate soldiers weren't fighting humans, they were fighting black animals according to their own letters home. I'm sorry, what? But here's the part that people don't really talk about this dehumanization flows both ways. During asymmetric warfare, the oppressed strip humanity from their oppressors just as efficiently. Resistance fighters don't see Colonel Smith with three kids back home, They actually see the fascist pig. It's not a moral failure. It's actually a survival adaptation. You can't effectively fight something you empathize with.

3:11 Political assassination operates on surgical dehumanization. The target isn't murdered, they're eliminated. They're not a person with morning coffee preferences and a fear of spiders. They're an abstraction, the obstacle, the symbol, the problem. John Wilkes Booth didn't kill Abraham Lincoln, the man who told funny stories and got melancholy. He killed Lincoln, the tyrant symbol Lee Harvey Oswald. If he did, it didn't kill John Kennedy, who loved sailing. He killed JFK, the representative of American imperialism.

3:47 And the fascinating part This precise targeted dehumanization requires more psychological energy than mass dehumanization. A soldier can be trained to see all enemies as subhuman, but an assassin must maintain normal human relationships with everyone except this one person who must become a thing. It's a perfect storm. And then there's the person who's made everyone disappear. The true misanthrope doesn't hate specific groups. They've performed wholesale dehumanization on the entire species. Humans aren't individuals with complex inner lives.

4:28 According to them, humans are a plague, a mistake, and a cosmic accident that just talks too much.

4:39 Please verify you are human. I'll wait. Arthur Schopenhauer, philosophy's most famous people hater, wrote that humans were like porcupines in winter. They need each other for warmth but can't get close without getting hurt. But that metaphor still gives humans animal agency. True misanthropy goes further. People aren't even porcupines. They're just noise that walks straight up. Yeah, baby.

5:11 Here's what connects all three scales. The collapse of the shared narrative. You see, wars, assassinations, and universal hatred all emerge when the stories that held the society together stops making sense. Julius Caesar's assassination wasn't just the murder of a man, it was the destruction of the Roman Republic. Story about itself. Archduke Ferdinand's death didn't start World War One, it shattered the illusion that European civilization was too sophisticated for large scale violence. The Assassin's bullet always lands at the exact spot where collective meaning fractures.

5:56 We request. That everybody stays at the current moment, for there is a zombie apocalypse currently happening on the West Coast. When shared myths breakdown, we lose the we that makes dialogue possible. Violence becomes the only language left. When words can no longer hold the weight of our differences, the conversation ends and the shooting begins. This is why misanthropy often follows personal trauma or disillusionment. The individual stories we tell ourselves about human goodness, about connection, about meaning, well, they collapse and suddenly the whole species looks like a cruel joke.

6:38 If you can't believe in the story of even one good human relationship, why in the hell would you believe in the story of humanity at all? Research shows people with conservative values tend to dehumanize more than those with liberal values, and these effects are cross cultural. But before anyone gets smug, remember that every political ideology has its designated non people. Conservatives might dehumanize immigrants, liberals might dehumanize fascists. And the mechanism is identical, only the targets shift.

7:13 So modern research indicates that dehumanization can occur in subtle ways even without overt hostility. You don't need to call someone a cockroach, you just need to stop wondering what they had for breakfast, what keeps them up at night, whether they're ever been genuinely happy or not. You see, wars, assassinations, and generalized hatred of humanity aren't different phenomena, they're the same psychological process applied at different scales. Take a human, remove their inner life, and suddenly anything becomes possible.

7:48 The only variable is how many humans you're willing to edit out of existence. I am the Lord your God, and you are meant to wish me. People can recognize when they're being dehumanized. They report feeling reduced to stereotype and treated as less than human, which means somewhere, consciously or not, we know exactly what we're doing to each other. Now understand this violence and hatred don't come from separate, dark part of human nature. They actually arise from exactly the same place as love and connection, The deep, aching need to belong, to have control, and to make meaning out of the chaos.

8:35 The suicide bomber and the mother cradling her newborn are both driven by the same fundamental human drive, the need to matter, to be a part of something larger than themselves. When that need for connection succeeds, you get families, communities, civilizations. When it fails, when belonging becomes impossible or meaning collapses, it doesn't disappear, it mutates. The frustrated need for connection becomes the impulse to destroy what excludes you. The thwarted desire for meaning becomes the drive to impose your meaning through force.

9:17 The same neural pathways that light up when we feel deep love also fire when we feel deep hatred. We're not broken when we dehumanize others. We're actually human. This is why the most violent conflicts often happen between groups that are most similar Protestants versus Catholics, Sunnis and Shia Muslims siblings. The closer we are, the more our failed connection can transform into something murderous. Freud called it the narcissism of small differences, but it's really the rage of almost belonging that got cut short.

10:06 So here's what might save us, if anything can. What is seeing the radical otherness of another person, really seeing how different they are from you, how unknowable their inner world is? It isn't what makes us dehumanize them. What if it's precisely what makes us most human? So basically what I'm saying is, let's think about this backwards. Dehumanization requires making others familiar or predictable, reducible to simple categories. For example, all terrorists think X, all liberals believe Y, and all conservatives want Z. It's the illusion that we understand others completely that allows us to dismiss them.

10:51 But true recognition means accepting that the person in front of you contains multitudes you'll never access, contradictions you'll never resolve, and experiences you'll never fully understand. They're not a puzzle to solve or a category to file. They're an entire universe wearing a human face. So the assassin fails because he thinks he knows exactly who his target is. The genocidal regime fails because it believes it understands exactly what kind of people it's eliminating, and the misanthrope fails because they think they figured out the essential nature of humanity.

11:37 But you can't reduce a universe to a bullet point, so you probably expected me to name the villains plastered across your feeds today to tell you which side is pure, which ideology is poison, and which group deserves your outrage. But that's too easy. You see, that's what your third grade teacher already told you when she told you the stories about the good guys and the bad guys.

12:09 I'm here to tell you something a bit more settling, and maybe more liberating. You see, resentment is normal. Love is normal. What's dangerous is the delusion of certainty, believing you've figured it all out, that you stand on the right side of history while everyone else stumbles in the dark. That certainty, that in itself is not wisdom. It is the first symptom of blindness. It is OK to change your mind. It's OK to look at the propaganda machine, whether it's draped in your favorite colors or not, and say I don't buy this one bit.

12:54 It is OK to question everything, including the voice in your head insisting you already know who the real humans are and who the monsters must be. Because what if, OK, it's just a theory. What if the opposite of war and hatred isn't peace but rather recognition? Not the shallow kind that says we're all the same underneath because we are not, We really are not. Real recognition says you are incomprehensibly, undoubtedly other than me. Control of. We rise part of rock'n'roll. And in that otherness, it is not a threat to erase, but a mystery to respect.

13:42 Every person you meet today, including the ones who discussed you, confuse you or contradict everything you believe will go home to thoughts you've never had, dreams you've never imagined, and fears that would feel alien to you. They are entire universes walking around in human form. That is not a flaw in human design. That's the feature that makes us worth defending. So here's your homework for today. The next time you reduce someone to their worst opinion, their tribe, or their surface label, I need you to pause.

14:22 Pause, take a deep breath, and remember you're looking at an entire universe. This will not end wars, guys. It will not stop assassinations, and it will certainly not cure misanthropy or make the Internet any less toxic. But it is the anecdote to the virus of dehumanization that lives in all of us. The courage to see others as fully human is not weak or naive or bloody well political. It is the only thing standing between US and the abyss, And that, more than peace, more than certainty, is the unusual practice worth carrying forward.

15:10 Somebody just followed me. I Love You Unusual Practice is a journey beyond the predictable. Each episode dives into the unexpected, the unconventional, and the transformative. Fusing Eastern and Western philosophies, UP explores the strange and the sacred, blending ancient rituals with modern insights, scientific introspection, and healing. Through curiosity from the chaos of being humans and mysteries we're told not to question, Up invites you to shift your lens and elevate. It's a portal, a pulse, and you, as with everything else, are the one creating it.