Kurt Gray’s Outraged is a must read for everyone today. It explores the important question “Why We Fight About Morality and Politics”. Whether you fight or not, I am sure this question would have come to your mind about the world we live in.

Is there a common ground. A common ground where we can converse and understand. There is always, but we need to take effort to find it. Many of us are not always ready to see it. Not ready to travel a bit to reach there. We are so caught up in our version of right and wrong that we don’t see the other person. Forget about disagreeing with the opposite argument, in some cases people do not see the opposite side as human enough to communicate. This is bad, but there is hope. And that hope demands the wheel to start rolling from our side not the opposite side. Each one of us individually. We… only we…

The book takes us into some fundamental human evolutionary patterns that tell us why we human beings are the way we are. We might think of ourselves as the biggest predators in the world, but our evolution was not as a predator, but as a prey. We are so weak. Many of us can’t even fight a dog with bare hands. We are so physically weak. That fear of being hurt also makes us create relationships that are harmful. Create world views and perspectives that impede us from understanding opposite views.

We stand on different sides and fight because we have different sense of what is harmful. Harmful for us, Harmful for the society, Harmful for the world. We have sometimes entirely opposite ideas of harm. Facts don’t matter in these scenarios. Each side looks at the other side as evil and stupid when it is not so.

We need to understand that there are no supervillains in the world, not in our camp not in the opposite camp. We are all human beings outraged at one another because we only have a goal to win and never to understand. We are afraid of being harmed.

None of us want to get hurt and we disagree on what is harmful to us. Below is a review I did for Book Positive