Murder Is Not Murder? A Personal Reflection on the Madness We Justify
Murder is not murder?
That phrase caught me off guard the first time it crossed my mind. It’s double-think at its worst. Every country on Earth has laws that prohibit the taking of another human life. We all nod our heads in agreement when we say murder is wrong. And yet—somehow—we keep doing it. We justify it. We twist it. Not only that, but we even make it heroic.
Why do we have laws against murder in the first place? My own sense is that, at the most basic level, we've observed something about death. Its finality. Its irreversibility. There's a natural understanding, deep in the human heart, that life is precious—and not something to be cut short lightly. That awareness is universal, even among those who have lost touch with their conscience.
And yet, we kill.
And what's worse—we build systems to make it acceptable. We create laws, and then we train lawyers to find clever ways around them. It’s almost as if the purpose of law becomes not to uphold what’s right, but to find legal cover for what is clearly wrong. If the right argument is made in the right courtroom, even murder can become "justified." The very framework that’s meant to protect life is twisted to excuse its destruction.
On an individual level, what drives a person to take another’s life? The usual suspects come to mind—fear, greed, hatred, jealousy. But those are surface-level explanations. I find myself asking a more uncomfortable question: Why do we allow these emotions to overpower the deep knowing inside us—that killing is wrong?
There is something so fundamentally sacred about each person. Not in a religious sense necessarily, but in a profoundly human sense. The uniqueness of each individual is miraculous. Every single person contains within them an entire world of dreams, fears, memories, and hopes. A whole lifetime. And we know this—not abstractly, but intimately. We feel it about ourselves. And at our best, we feel it about others too.
So why do we forget?
My conclusion is this: we’ve been taught to forget. Or at least, we haven't been taught to remember. From early on, we learn to see others as background characters in our personal story. Our culture celebrates individualism, competition, and dominance. Even entertainment normalizes violence. Think of the video games where human lives are reduced to “targets,” and killing them earns you points. Points?! It’s absurd. It's unconscious. And yet it's woven into how many people escape into fantasy.
And it’s not just the games—it’s the language we use. Soldiers are “neutralized.” Collateral damage is “unfortunate but necessary.” We speak in euphemisms to conceal the horror. Orwell was right when he warned us in 1984 about doublethink: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies... to forget whatever it was necessary to forget...”
This isn’t just individual confusion—it’s institutionalized murder. As a society, we’ve found ways to legitimize the killing of others, especially when they are labelled “the enemy.” One of the biggest tools for this is nationalism. The idea that “my country,” “my flag,” or “my way of life” is somehow superior—so superior, in fact, that it justifies killing those who don’t share it.
Isn’t that the rationale behind almost every war?
My bit of land, my inherited myths, my tribe—they matter more than yours. And if you disagree, I’ll kill you. Not personally, of course—I’ll outsource that to someone in uniform and call it honour. But the act is the same. It’s murder, dressed up in ritual and rhetoric.
And what’s truly sad is that this mindset not only devalues the lives of others—it cheapens our own. If we don’t see other lives as special, how can we believe our own is? If we’re all just cogs in a machine, or actors in someone else’s script, then anything becomes possible. Even the most dreadful things.
But there is another way.
There are voices—quiet but clear—reminding us of what it means to be human. I think of Prem Rawat, a teacher I deeply respect, who speaks not about religion or politics but about the importance of inner peace and understanding our own humanity. In one of his talks, he said: “The day you begin to see the value of your own life is the day you will begin to see the value of all life.”
That rings true to me.
We don’t need more ideologies. We need more awareness. We need to reawaken that part of us that knows life is a miracle—ours and everyone else's. Imagine what might change if we actually lived with that awareness day by day. If instead of seeing others as threats or tools or competitors, we saw them as fellow travellers through this astonishing, fleeting journey of life.
Life is short. Too short for hate. Too short for war. Too short for justifying the unjustifiable.
The craziness is never justified. Not when we pause long enough to remember what it really means to be human.
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