My first thought does not belong to me, but to the systemic cycle which cursed me since the day I was born. Usually, the second thought is me hating myself for that first thought. And then correcting it, like a teacher angrily wiping a Celtic cross off the whiteboard and trying (+ failing) to explain fascism to a twelve-year-old. I always want to play by the rules (of empathy). I see both the teacher and the child, their fears and patterns that turn into prejudice, that turn into first thoughts. The human brain seems to have a natural propensity for one-label categories and stereotypes. Can we ever hope to purge this first thought? 

Maybe first thoughts are not evil, just fearful guardians concerned with our survival in a horrible world. According to Hannah Arendt, real evil is banal, devoid of thought and logic (2006: 27). So maybe first thoughts are a first small protest against entrenched evil. We carry them around like an amniotic bag (Neimanis 2020), and let them grow, cry and fight like children until they turn from stereotypes and categories into empathic weavings. We all have these inner children that we should protect from violence. If people could read minds, everyone would get cancelled at some point. Hate is killed with empathy, not punishment, and if those who are mistaken are never gently held, they will lash out even more. It takes self-sacrifice to welcome other beings around oneself. At the end of his conversation with Herr C., Heinrich von Kleist asked: „Then […] we would have to eat again of the tree of knowledge to fall back again into a state of innocence? Most certainly, he replied: That is the last chapter of the history of the world” (1972: 26). It seems like even those who believe in God would never eat that fruit again, and those who don’t would deny its very existence. That fruit was the first thought. 

Healing has become the most important revolution. We should try to feel for as many as possible, to take in their otherness with some form of empathy.

Toni Morrison said that „Everything is now” (quoted in Neimanis 2020), but capitalism does not give us space to put everything into now, so we hold onto separate, misguided parts of it; parts that quickly turn into lies. „The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good” (Arendt 1981: 180), and we do have to act on the choice when push comes to shove. No time to ponder, or gather more parts of everything into a now. Does indecisiveness mean a lack of principles or just the sign of too much patience? To listen and not judge, to seek and to heal? 

Every crisis feels like a rebranded dupe version of the Apocalypse. 

Time feels like the universe – infinite, but with maddening limits beyond our human reach – and yet we treat it as finite. Time transcends mere human life and gives unimaginable spaces for the most ambitious projects. The Earth – a speck of cosmic dust with its huge net of ecosystems (Feldman 2019). I hope that when we look back and see the frozen numbness of past mistakes, we learn to defrost and break our own numbness. 

Let out all our demons in a cosmic rage room. Let our first thoughts finally heal and grow up. And finally achieve togetherness.