Sapolsky

Consider the World War I Christmas truce of 1914. The powers that be had negotiated a brief truce so that soldiers could go out, collect bodies from no-man's-land in between the trench lines. And soon British and German soldiers were doing that, and then helping each other carry bodies, and then helping each other dig graves in the frozen ground, and then praying together, and then having Christmas together and exchanging gifts, and by the next day, they were playing soccer together and exchanging addresses so they could meet after the war. That truce kept going until the officers arrived and said, "We will shoot you unless you go back to trying to kill each other." And all it took here was hours for these men to develop a completely new category of "us," all of us in the trenches here on both sides, dying for no damn reason, and who is a "them," those faceless powers behind the lines who were using them as pawns.

And sometimes, change can occur in seconds. Probably the most horrifying event in the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre. A brigade of American soldiers went into an undefended village full of civilians and killed between 350 and 500 of them, mass-raped women and children, mutilated bodies. It was appalling. It was appalling because it occurred, because the government denied it, because the US government eventually did nothing more than a slap on the wrist, and appalling because it almost certainly was not a singular event. This man, Hugh Thompson, this is the man who stopped the My Lai Massacre. He was piloting a helicopter gunship, landed there, got out and saw American soldiers shooting babies, shooting old women, figured out what was going on, and he then took his helicopter and did something that undid his lifetime of conditioning as to who is an "us" and who is a "them." He landed his helicopter in between some surviving villagers and American soldiers and he trained his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and said, "If you don't stop the killing, I will mow you down."

Robert Sapolsky