Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn

By Amaya Gayle Gregory

One of Health Ledger’s last roles was the Joker in The Dark Knight. There is a scene in it that has been plaguing me, the words niggling at my mind and heart.

In the words of Alfred Pennyworth to Bruce Wayne: ‘Some men just want to watch the world burn.’

Is that where we are? Has the bane of living been so intense that those at the top literally want to watch the world burn, that they believe they will feel less pain by inflicting pain on as many others as they can?

What brings someone to the point that they simply want to watch the world burn?

What is capable of turning a person inside out so instead of love and compassion (our natural state), they exhibit anger and hate? Love is natural to us, not fuzzy Valentine love, but genuine love of life in its infinitely diverse forms. Hate is learned, not inherent. It is taken on to assuage the wounds of life. Of course, it doesn’t work, but that’s another story for another time.

What flips the switch, or was the switch flipped at birth? Does abuse account for someone losing all touch with their humanity or is it more complex? It feels more like a perfect storm of prior inclination, abuse, and the collective’s distorted story to me. Whatever the reason, it’s a common ailment these days. It’s not just one or two people, a couple patient zeros. It’s not one man who is totally off the rails and took a few others with him. It’s bigger, so much bigger.

Those who enable the mass destruction are not innocent. They are accountable as well, and if there is a God, which they better hope is not so, there will be an accounting for all the pain and harm they cause.

Thankfully, I don’t see it that way. In my world, there isn’t a white man with a white beard sitting on a white cloud dispensing rewards and punishment. There isn’t a once and done life that ends with me and you standing in front of the pearly gates begging entry. In my world I (we) appear to die and reform into new expressions and come out to play again. It’s a constant cycle, infinity chasing its tail, form to infinity, infinity to form.

It’s what’s happening already right now. We just don’t see it. We are constantly reformed … by new experiences, new ideas, new thoughts, new insights. We are focused on life and death and judging what’s happening, so we miss that we aren’t a subject of birth or death.

Death, or the experience we think of as dying, doesn’t change a thing. Oops. Not true. It is change, part of the infinity loop that passes for time and space, human appearing alive and human appearing dead. Change Is. It is life.

I have to imagine that if those who want to see the world burn knew what they really are, if they realized they can turn the world to ashes, but it won’t stop the loop from looping, it won’t end their pain, that it will add more pain to the loop from which they and all of us are reformed, they might slow the hell down … or not.

That’s what they’re doing, raining hell down on life in an attempt to find release from the hell they are in.

This too will change, for life is miraculous change: It is diverse, equitable, inclusive.

These are not things someone can legislate out of reality or sign a document to make it not so. Life is comprised of all things, all beings, all of its expressions. It is diverse. It is inclusive. It includes it all. It is fair, not in the sense of life being easy and abundant for each of us, for each apparently separate life form—God knows that doesn’t appear to be so—but fairness as a whole. All that goes into the pipeline comes out the other end. What we give, we get back.

Life manifests in sync with what is expressing. It is always a master class demonstrating what resonates, what beliefs hold sway, what the current state of love is. It cannot but display the true state of the heart.

Some religions call that karma. Others speak of it as the Golden Rule. Some simply say, be kind. They all point to a bigger truth: we will experience what we offer out to the world. There’s a reason the more we get pulled into the anger, the angrier we feel, the more anger there is to react to, the more anger builds.

Unchecked untended unowned unacknowledged unfettered anger, that’s likely how those at the top came to the point that they wanted to burn the world down.

What if instead of anger to fuel the resistance we tap into love to nourish inclusivity, to sustain equity, to celebrate diversity? What if we show the world what it’s missing, what is possible, what we truly are?

Amaya Gayle is the author of Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY