One of the hardest things to deal with as someone coming to terms with the political world is rejecting the global conspiracy. It makes life so much easier. Global warming? Corporations/government laughing their way to the bank as they burn trees and have protestors disappeared. Government repression? Corporations/government again, whistling as they crush opposition and ensure the eternal survival of the sacred fifth reich.
All the ills of the world, handily attributable to a single faction hellbent on creating trouble. It's a nice image. It certainly is popular - there's no other explanation for the phenomenal success of conspiracy theorist writers like Ludlum or the tediously dull Dan Brown. Their writing is nothing to, well, write home about.
It's more likely, however, that all these ills are caused by people being people. Not evil, per se, just human, and therefore constantly indulging in petty bickery, small-time corruption, mild irrationality and other diversions, all mixing together to create the current environment of worldwide tension we face today. And all of it is directly attributable to 6 billion people just like you and me, all indulging in those little evils every single day.
Of course that's an unpopular thought. And so we regularly attribute the doing of great evils to some enormous flaw in the character of an individual. The rapist, who we feel would be a rapist even in a perfect world. The murderer, who would of course murder even if there was no cause. The torturer, who would undoubtably turn to furthering his sick art in a less official capacity were he to lose governmental support.
Certainly there are people out there just like that. You look into their eyes and you see the fires of hell burning back at you. Or even worse, you see nothing. The same woman who would cheerfully saute her own children for a snack might have the same kindly expression as a grandmother on her rocking chair.
But they aren't in the majority. As far as I can tell they're about as rare as the saints. We all know someone who is a relentless force for justice, the diamond in the sand. These living saints cancel out the demons, being present in a roughly one-to-one balance.
But most of us, and I include myself in this category (being neither a saint nor a vicious bastard), are simply mildly bad. Sure, most people will follow the laws where convenient and safe, but a strong moral stance on everything is extremely rare, and usually tied to a total lack of compromise that strips the love from whatever faith the zealot professes. And so we all, in our own small ways, go about the world making it a little less habitable a day at a time.
Every once in a while we realise how bad the world has got and, just for a little while, we make it a little better. Dictators are overthrown, popular revolutions flourish, the past is decried. Then we sink back into the malaise of life and realise that life is less complex with the dictators, that the past has valuable lessons for a convenient life, and that doing a necessary evil is just a little easier than doing what's right.
It's all very depressing really. But the simple fact is that there is no diabolical conspiracy, no horrible individual, no twisted little cabal of unspeakable evil at the source of all the world's numerous problems. Just countless millions of Joe/Akbar/Lin/Tok Averages, all making the world a little worse every day.
The consequence of this is fairly simple. We're no angels, and chances are those we criticise are little worse than ourselves. Sure, you can hate people for doing bad things, but only if you equally hate yourself because you do bad things. Otherwise you may as well retreat from the world and surround yourself with nature/robots, because there's no other way you're going to hold the moral high ground.