In one of the many societies I created in elementary school, I decided that not only would there be no laws, there would be no crime. And I meant this not as “well of course there’s no crime if there are no laws to break,” but rather as “there are no laws because no one needs them to know the difference between right and wrong.” There were to be no killings. No non-consensual transfer of property. No thwarting of people’s pure identities—only acceptance and love. There were to be no weapons, no human rights violations, and although I doubt I knew it existed at the time, no rape. I remember wishing that that was how my actual society was, too (after all, that was the whole point of creating new ones), and wondering how it wasn’t. Wondering how people could kill each other, how people could steal, how people could flaunt weaponry and words with the intent to harm. Of course, at that age I knew very little of human nature. I knew about the fallibility of human bodies, to an extent I still can’t quite imagine. I knew love, I knew apathy, I knew hurt. But I did not know the causes, or to what extent they could influence actions. But as I have gotten older, and I have taken psychology classes and written and thought, I have realized how incredibly influential actions are on a person. It is all some warped sort of physics: for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. If I feel my own needs are not being attended to, I’m not going to attend to anyone else’s. If someone pushes me, I will push back. But there is also the first law: an object in motion will stay in motion. So if you push me, I may push back, but that initial push will never stop affecting me. This is how the cycle of violence continues: children growing up and hurting more children, who grow up to hurt more children, and again, and again, and again. We wonder why people don’t just learn, why alcoholics’ children become alcoholics themselves, why people stay with a partner who abuses them. It’s hard to just stop. It defies all physics. And people do learn: they learn from those around them. And if those around them are joining gangs or raping or even judging people’s outfit choices, that’s what people are going to do, too. And as I have grown older, and changed from someone who kicked and slapped and yelled if anyone got too close to someone who relentlessly pushed pacifism, I have learned about the other side of human nature, the internal part. I have learned that it is as much human nature to hate and fight as it is to love and flee. And although one person may have a different predisposition to an action than another, we all have those desires, those inclinations. That which we act upon is dependent on a million other things we cannot control. And I think this brings me to the other, very key part of Newton’s first law: unless acted upon by an outside force. You see, when it comes to those of us who don’t murder, no matter how angry we are, no matter how much our arm shakes with the desire to do so, the many forces we have in our lives which tell us not to murder become stronger than that very human, undeniably animal desire to do so anyway. We were taught that it was wrong, either by our parents, or our pastors, or our teachers. We were told stories of people who were brutally murdered, we were told stories of tragedy and families being ripped apart. And somewhere in all of that, we found a strong reason not to let the same happen at our hand. But also, somewhere, many people didn’t find that reason. Maybe not enough stories were told to them, or maybe the wrong ones. Maybe they suffered from “affluenza” circa 2013, and were taught that some instances are exceptions depending on their situation. Maybe the force causing the movement in the first place was always stronger than any force to the contrary could ever be. Such is the nature of human psychology, I suppose: nothing but very nuanced physics. As I recounted to a friend the other day, the key events of my childhood—things that happened before I even turned 10—can almost be blamed for anything I have ever done. When I obsessively arrange things in a perfect order, whether or not anyone else can understand that order, I do so to react against the chaos that has acted upon me. When I tell someone I don’t care, I am moving in the direction I was pushed, and when I genuinely try to help, I am pushing back. I imagine this is how it is for everyone else, too: still just acting and reacting from things that happened long ago.
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I'm Audrey, a college student and existential rambler.
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February 2021
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