People don't know why they do the things they do, yet they never lose their hunger for explanations. We obsess over behaviors as far flung as suicide bombers and saintly surrender, often being confused about what distinguishes one from the other. Presidents loathe being called mass murderers ('Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?'), yet no mass murderer has come within miles of ending as many lives as a wartime President does. One could argue that civilization itself has been one long quest to answer the question "Why did I do that?" How we explain ourselves to ourselves becomes the very root of our belief system. Let's say that I do something extreme like steal your crops and burn your house down. Why did I do that? At various times in history the following explanations were sufficient: --My people are stronger than yours. We take what we want.--My God told me I belong to the chosen people, and you don't.--I am part of a growing empire, out to conquer the world.--I'm on a crusade to make the world Christian (or Muslim, Communist, Nazi, Maoist, etc.)--I'm a patriot doing my patriotic duty. These answers are all, in their way, positive. They have a certainty behind them, a strong sense of purpose. When asking "Why did I do that?" the answer could be that I don't know, or that I'm sick, neurotic, anxious, full of self-doubt. Those are very modern answers, children of the twentieth century. I could even be brain-washed like the citizens of North Korea. Recently, in light of research in neurology, I could be hard-wired for certain behaviors, or genetically predisposed. I could be a puppet of evolution. This hardly exhausts the list of possibilities, for there is always fantasy, delusion, romance, emotion, and true inspiration to take into account. God told me to do it. Love made me do it. I live only for art. It's altogether amazing that we know the reasons for anything we do, or that history provides enough space to explore half the possibilities. If you can see your own complexity in this description, it's good to realize that the same tangled mesh encloses people you don't know, like child suicide bombers in Iraq, conscientious objectors in WW II, Buddhist monks who burned themselves alive in protest to the war in Vietnam, as well as equally inexplicable benign figures like Jesus and Mother Theresa. Because we can't fully know why we do things, we keep searching for new answers, and at the same time we try out the weirdest and most glorious possibilities. Wisdom lies in being tolerant of your own complexity and then extending that tolerance to everyone else. At the present moment two kinds of intolerance exist that are both based on oversimplified answers to the question, "Why did I do that?" One oversimplification is science, which tries to reduce any behavior to a mechanistic, materialistic model. The other false answer holds that religious fanaticism is an all-powerful, utterly blind motivation. Neither is true. "Why did I do that?" remains one of the great mysteries of human existence, and we all should respect it.
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