Martin Luther King Jr-“Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; -Martin Luther King Jr.
For upon |Hate Cannot Drive Out Hate Quote – I agree with this quote by Martin Luther King Jr. for many reasons. I probably don’t fully understand it, due to the many motives of King, but I get the basics and those basics I strongly agree with those.
What he is saying here is that where there is darkness, more darkness will not make light. Only light can eradicate darkness. He understands that two negative concepts cannot make a positive one; only by combining positive and negative things can one achieve a positive or just make nothing.
Hate cannot get rid of hate either for similar reasons. When a person hates another person, the only way they will stop is if the hated doesn’t hate back. What this means is when someone hates someone else and the feeling is mutual, they will just keep hating each other until someone resorts to forgiveness or compromise.
The hated person decides instead to love the hater,
When the hated person decides instead to love the hater, they may not end the hating immediately, but eventually, the hate will go away and the two people will get along fine. They may not forget about the hate that used to exist, but they will no longer experience it on either side.
In a dark room where no light is in any way allowed, more darkness will have no effect. Sure, it may be there, but in reality, it’s not DOING anything. However, once a tiny bit of light is allowed into this hypothetical room, shadows appear and the room can no longer be thought of as “pitch black.”
Any small amount of light will have this effect, even if it’s not noticeable to anyone in the room when the change happens. However, there is a huge difference between a pitch-black room where one can not tell if their eyes are open or closed and a room where one can barely make out shapes to convince oneself that they are not going crazy.
Hate is another concept King mentions that the idea of the darkroom can be applied to. When someone has absolutely nothing for a person but hate, the other person can hate the first all they want; it will not affect the first person’s feelings.
the second person shows love and compassion towards the other in any small action
However, if the second person shows love and compassion towards the other in any small action or just a few words, the hater is instantly given a decent reason to stop hating. When they realize that this person is a good person (or acts that way anyhow) they will feel bad about themselves if they continue hating, as though it were a bad thing. Even though it was a bad thing before, now it’s no longer justifiable in any way.
Maybe at first, someone did something wrong to “earn” the hate, but once love is shown, that justification dies and any reason to hate melts away.
Maybe we don’t always feel like it, but even a small amount of good can overcome any amount of bad. When a flashlight is turned on at midnight, suddenly the area around it is visible, if not everything in eyesight. Anything can make a difference, which can go both ways, but it works for good overpowering evil.
The article was originally published here.
What does that mean?
To me, this quote is about a fundamental truth of the universe and the corresponding relationship in the human heart. It starts out stating the obvious. Darkness is a lack of light. More darkness cannot make it less dark, which is something only bringing light can accomplish.
Similarly, the quote tells us that hate cannot drive hate from your heart or the hearts of others. The only thing which can do that, according to the quote, is love. While the analogy breaks down a little with hate not being exactly equal to the absence of love, the premise is spot on.
In the end, hate will continue if left unopposed. The question is how to best oppose it. The quote states what I believe is one of the best and simplest methods. While no method is fool-proof or without risk, it is the best and most effective method I have seen or experienced.
Why is bringing love to fight hatred important?
If you’re going to try to drive out hate, you need to bring the love. It won’t be pleasant, but it’s the truth. Bringing love doesn’t mean you believe as they do, or even that you like them. It simply means that you consider the human bond to be stronger than their hate.
If you match them hate for hate, the world will not be a better place for your effort. What little satisfaction you gain will be temporary at best, and will eventually be to the detriment of everyone. That’s neither a good plan nor is it much of a legacy for our children to inherit, a world filled with more hate than ever.
I believe that most hatred is based on inaccurate information, or stories told about injustices of old. The hate can only be kept alive if the recipients of the hated act are according to the script. The most disruptive thing we can do to the script is to show them love and compassion and blow the narrative apart. Are you willing to try?
Where can I apply this in my life?
I would hope you would use this any time you felt hatred towards another, and also in response to anyone who showed hatred towards you. I would also hope you would apply it both to personal issues, as well as larger group issues, whether they are based on race, creed, religion, affiliation, or any other aggregation.
Where in your life are there haters, and what is it that they hate?
Sometimes hate can be based on group rivalries (High Schools are bad about that – nerds vs jocks, as an example). Other times it’s more specific to you as a person (romantic rivals or bullies come to mind).
However, even if you know that it won’t work on them, that’s still OK. The exercise is for you, not for them. Whether it is a hatred of them directly or a hatred in return for their hatred, nothing will change until you can set your hate aside.
As with most things in life, you have no control over the other person. Once you realize that fact, this quote becomes an exercise for strengthening yourself and overcoming your hatred, anger, and resentment. How much better would your life be if you could accomplish that?
Even if you never get to the point where hatred no longer exists within you, nor could any action stir it, I believe that it is a laudable goal. I believe the journey, however poorly we manage it, is a worthy effort. Even if it only reduces the hate on the planet by one person, it has proven valuable to all humanity.
And if like the author of the quote, you can live this way and inspire others with your actions, then you will have accomplished far more than any law against hate. You will have lived it and helped others to recognize its value it. And that is truly a noble deed.
The article was originally published here.
A series of memes often shared on Facebook in South Africa attributes a quote on love and hate to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And the quote is often flagged as possibly false by the social network’s fact-checking system.
It reads: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
King was a Christian minister, a powerful orator, and a leader of the US civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. Quotes from his speeches, sermons, and books are often shared online. Former US President Barack Obama shared this particular quote on Facebook in 2015.
But does it come from the King? Yes.
Quote in 1963 book by King
The quote can be found in Strength to Love, a collection of King’s writing published in 1963.
It’s on page 37 of the 1963 Harper & Row edition of the book.
The fuller passage reads: “Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness implies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.” – Butchie Seroto
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The article was originally published here.
For upon |Yesterday, I saw a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. fly across my Twitter feed: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr”. I was about to retweet it, but I hesitated. It didn’t sound right. After some Googling, I determined that it was probably fake, which I wrote about last night.
Here’s the story of how that quote was created.
It turns out I was far too uncharitable in my search for a motive behind the fake quote. I assumed that someone had made it up on purpose. I was wrong.
Had I seen the quote on Facebook, rather than Twitter, I might have guessed the truth. On the other hand, had I seen it on Facebook, I might not have realized it was fake, because it was appended to a long string of genuine speeches from MLK Jr. Here’s the quote as most people on Facebook saw it:
I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
Everything except the first sentence is found in King’s book, Strength to Love, and seems to have been said originally in a 1957 sermon he gave on loving your enemies. Unlike the first quotation, it does sound like King, and it is easy to assume that the whole thing came from him.
So how did they get mixed together?
Thanks to Jessica Dovey, a Facebook user, that’s how. And contrary to my initial assumption, it wasn’t malicious. Ms. Dovey, a 24-year-old Penn State graduate who now teaches English to middle schoolers in Kobe, Japan, posted a very timely and moving thought on her Facebook status, and then followed it up with the Martin Luther King Jr. quote.
I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” MLK Jr.
At some point, someone cut and pasted the quote, and–for reasons that I, appropriately chastened, will not speculate on–stripped out the quotation marks. Eventually, the mangled quotation somehow came to the attention of Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame. He tweeted it to his 1.6 million Facebook followers, and the rest was internet history. Twenty-four hours later, the quote brought back over 9,000 hits on Google.
The quote also went viral on Twitter, and since the 140-character limit precluded quoting the whole thing, people stripped it down to the most timely and appropriate part: the fake quote. That’s where I saw it.
The speed of dissemination is breathtaking: mangled to meme in less than two days. Also remarkable is how defensive people got about the quote–though admirably, not Penn Jillette, who posted an update as soon as it was called to his attention.
The thread for my post now has over 600 comments, and by my rough estimate, at least a third of them are people posting that I need to print a retraction, because of the non-fake part of the quotation. But I didn’t quote that part; I was only interested in the too-timely bit I’d seen twittered.
Even more bizarrely, several of these readers, who hadn’t read too closely, started claiming that I had retroactively edited the post to make them look like idiots, even going so far as to scrub all the versions in RSS readers so that they, too, showed that I was talking about the truncated version. Martin Luther King Jr.
Even if you think I am the sort of low scoundrel who would do such a thing, this seems like a lot of work for not much reward. I’m not sure whether it’s even possible to completely scrub an RSS feed, but even if it were, I’d have had to notify my bosses, who tend to frown on retroactive editing.
several other people began confabulating a provenance
Meanwhile, several other people began confabulating a provenance for it. He was talking about Vietnam, and what sort of moral midget couldn’t understand that? This is even though the latest citation for the true part of the quote was a book published in 1967, which would have been written earlier than that when US casualties in Vietnam were still relatively low. Moreover, the ambiguity with which the antiwar movement viewed the North Vietnamese makes “enemy” a hard fit.
It is, of course, not strange that people might look for possible confirming facts. What’s strange is that they were sure enough of themselves to make fun of anyone who disagreed. Yet several other people on the comment thread had linked to a version of the quotation from 1957. I am second to no one in my admiration for Dr. King. But I do not think that he prefigured Vietnam for seven years.
illustrates why fake quotes are so widely dispersed
Which only illustrates why fake quotes are so widely dispersed. Though one commenter accused me of trying to make people feel stupid for having propagated the quote, that was hardly my intention–we’ve all probably repeated more fake quotations than real ones. Fake quotations are pithier, more dramatic, and more on point than the things people usually say in real life.It’s not surprising that they are often the survivors of the evolutionary battle for mindshare. One person posted a passage that integrated the fake quotation into the larger section of the book from which the original MLK words were drawn.
We become invested in these quotes because they say something important about us–and they let us feel that those emotions were shared by great figures in history.
We naturally search for reasons that they could have said it–that they could have felt like us–rather than looking for reasons to disbelieve. If we’d put the same moving words in Hitler’s mouth, everyone would have been a lot more skeptical. But while this might be a lesson about the need to be skeptical, I don’t think there’s anything stupid about wanting to be more like Dr. King.
Ms. Dovey’s status now reads
Ms. Dovey’s status now reads: “has gone back in time and put her words into one of MLK’s sermons. I’m somewhere between nervous and embarrassed and honored… I hope I haven’t said anything he wouldn’t agree with. Only what I feel in my heart.”
A lot of us were feeling the same thing. And I think it’s clear from his writings that MLK would have too. There’s no reason to be embarrassed about that.
The article was originally published here.
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