Where Empathy Stops

I can’t get my head around the Islamic State. I’m usually good at understanding people—following their logic, seeing what drives them, even when I completely disagree. But this reaches a limit I didn’t know I had.

These are people executing others in the street, crucifying them, building a state on terror and calling it holy. How do you get there? What kind of hatred, what faith, what brokenness has to exist for you to do that to another human being? I ask myself this and I just hit a wall.

Sometimes I wonder if they’re all broken—cast-outs, people the world rejected, looking for somewhere they belong so badly they’ll join anything. But I don’t think that’s the whole answer. Some of them probably genuinely believe they’re right. That killing their own brothers and degrading their sisters is justified, even righteous. The thought makes me sick.

Religion becomes something different when it’s used like this—not a guide or a question, but a tool for power, a language for cruelty. And it works. It recruits people, shapes them, makes them certain.

My empathy has always been pretty expansive. I can get into someone’s head, understand where they’re coming from, hold complexity. But not this. Not all the way. Some people choose darkness in a way I can’t reach or fathom. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s where understanding has to stop.