Transcriber: Pimrak Phantprasit Reviewer: Amanda Chu
I want to begin with a story.
I used to have a childhood friend.
We know each other from about five to ten years old.
We lived next to each other; we were very close.
Until about I was 10 years old,
he moved away,
and we never got to see each other again.
Until about five years ago,
we met again online through Facebook.
This is during the Red Shirts protest in Bangkok at the time.
We became very active politically.
We shared a lot of comments.
We discussed a lot of political issues.
And we didn't agree on everything,
but it was on friendly terms.
But one day,
one thing happened that still caused the ripples
that made me talk about the thing I'm going to talk about today.
I gave an interview to a news website in Thailand,
which is quite a well-known news website.
And then it was shared quite a lot in social networks.
My friend also shared my article.
And on his status about my interview article,
he called me a "salim,"
(Laughs)
which is, for the foreigner who doesn't know,
it's quite a bad word for conservatives in Thailand.
But anyway,
then his liberal friends came to comment in the article.
And they gave me names.
They brought my mother and father into the discussions.
They gave them names.
They made me feel very stupid.
They made me feel like I'm worth absolutely nothing.
Looking back,
that is the first day I get to feel the feeling
that I'm going to talk about today:
hatred.
Five years later
and many countries I have traveled to,
because I started being a world traveler five years ago,
I think that I'm living a totally different life right now.
At that time, five years ago, I paid him back in kind.
I paid them back in kind.
I hated him back passionately.
But now, many countries later, many journeys later,
I think I'm living a different life.
I'm living a hate-free life.
And I know you guys all feel it in your own daily life.
I know you all feel it at a certain point.
That's why we are going to talk about it today,
talk about hatred.
And hopefully by the end of this journey around the world together,
we can all understand two questions together:
"Why do we hate each other so much?"
and the more important question,
"How not to hate?"
But first, a little bit about myself.
OK, my name is Wannasingh Prasertkul.
I am a documentary maker.
I love my job passionately.
I get to do a lot of cool stuff.
I get to fish for Piranhas in the Amazon river.
I get to trek in the ruin of Chernobyl.
I get to practice Kungfu
in Wudang Mountains in China.
And recently, I just got back from a trip from Jordan,
that we went on the camel
and ride across the desert after the trail of Lawrence of Arabia.
And one time in my life,
I even got a chance to interview His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
So yes, it's an awesome job.
I love it very much.
But no matter how fun it is,
it's still a job.
And my job is to go out there
and understand one thing:
human.
I have to talk and talk
and interview so many people, talk with them -
at least 1,000 or maybe 2,000 people
from across different parts of the world.
And one thing that I found, going across the places,
is not only the people or the clothes or the food
that changes with the scenery,
but one thing that keeps changing with it
is the answer to this question:
What is a good man?
There is just so many answers to this question
across all over the world.
In Kenya, I stayed with a Maasai tribe,
a fierce warrior tribe,
for a week.
The Maasai has this tradition
that they have to go out once each male reaches puberty.
They have to go out into the Savanna
and hunt for a lion
in order to prove that they are a man,
they're strong, they can protect their tribe
because they are fierce warriors.
And to protect their tribe, that is a good thing to do.
That is the moral thing to do.
I tried to put on the hat, but it didn't fit me.
Yeah, I tried to switch the hat.
So, yeah, we switched back.
(Laughs)
In Bhutan,
a totally different idea exists.
There are some communities in Bhutan
that don't allow slaughterhouses to be built in the communities,
because it's against the Buddhist law of mercy and nonkilling,
but they eat meat.
How do they eat meat?
They import it from India.
Or maybe they wait for the yak or the cow to die from natural causes
or from accidents,
falling off from the cliff or something like that,
so they can get the meat.
This doesn't make any economic sense at all,
doesn't make any rational sense,
but it makes totally moral sense for them.
So in one place, killing is a good thing.
It proves that you are the protector of the tribe.
You can be a man,
protect your father, your family, your mother
when the time comes for war.
On the other place,
killing is not acceptable
no matter for what reason,
even for eating.
What is a good man?
So many different answers.
I also went to Rwanda.
And many of you know what happened in Rwanda.
This is in the museum,
all the dried corpses laying out,
hundreds of them -
men, women and children -
all laid out for me to see.
I still can remember the smell in this room.
It all started with name calling,
like Hutus called the Tutsi "cockroaches," "snakes," "weeds,"
something that need to be plucked from the ground.
Sound familiar?
One of the most shocking thing I learned about this trip to Rwanda
is that after a day's killing,
all the members of the Hutus,
who were the perpetrators of the genocide toward the Tutsi,
they had a town meeting,
and they congratulated each other on a good day's communal work.
And those who did not participate
were called freeloaders,
those who did not share the responsibility of the society to kill.
So no matter how to accept this,
there exists a point in time in this world
that the idea of killing another human being
becomes something morally good for a certain group of people.
So the obvious question to ask is, Why?
Why does this happen?
Everybody wants to be a good man.
No matter who I talk to, no matter what culture,
they want to be accepted, respected and seen as a good man.
And there exists an idea of goodness,
a measurement,
how to measure what is good and what is bad,
which is totally different from each society to the next.
And each form of a goodness can be used to enhance our life,
or to abuse, to create horrendous things.
The idea of freedom in the West
can be used to create self-enhancement,
self-development, tolerance,
love or peace.
At the same time, it can be used for legitimizing greed, selfishness,
discrimination or, sometimes, war.
The same thing can be said about religion.
It can be used for legitimizing violence, fanaticism, killing, war;
at the same time,
it can be used for creating love, mercy, harmony, kindness.
The problem is that people with different moral values
don't get to see each other.
They have this wall between them,
and then can have tendency to see the worst in each other.
And when they see the worst, someone ought to hate first,
and it becomes very normal to hate back.
Just think about all the political conflicts
we're having right now in Thailand.
But no matter what the content of the moral code is,
the same thing serves the same purpose,
the same context
to answer the question "What is a good man?"
As a documentary maker,
the best thing about my job
is not that I get to travel across the world,
is not that I get to do a lot of cool stuff
but I get to see across this wall.
I get to go and ask and understand
and really pay attention to what they have to say.
I used to think that Muslim and Islam religion
is very irrational and doesn't make any sense
and sometimes scary.
But until I get a chance to go to a lot of the Middle Eastern countries -
this is in Iran -
I get to see something different.
It's not about their ideology or their religion at all;
it's that they're the same as us.
They're chilling in the park.
They're chatting with their friends on the cellphone.
And this is me and my ma - hello, mom - sitting over there.
Hello. (Laughs)
They keep treating us like celebrities
because not a lot of East Asians go to Iran.
And they keep taking photos with us,
and they give us food on the street all the time.
They give us grapes, give us apples,
and they are very good fruits,
and we are fed all the time by the local population.
They're all very kind.
And this is in Palestine.
I joined a group of protesters,
Palestinian protesters, against the Israeli police.
I was there.
They were shouting angrily,
and the cops were shooting tear gas and flashbang force,
which is kind of fun, yeah? (Laughs)
But anyway, they were very angry
and I sat down with them
and asked about their lives,
"What's happening, man? Why are you so angry?"
And they answered me,
they don't get to see their families, they don't get to go out,
they don't get to travel or go to the airport.
Basically, it's not a religious problem;
it's the same problem we're having:
family problems, human problems.
I met this man under a staircase in Pakistan,
which some newspapers call the most dangerous place in the world.
This guy is a musician.
He stays in a very tiny room under the staircase.
And then he invited us to his tiny room and performed for us,
only four of us,
and he sang very passionately.
He sang with his heart.
His name is Vash Bhak,
which is quite difficult to remember.
But his song stays with me.
And he said to me that "if everybody sings like this,
no problem in the world, man,"
yeah, just like Jamaican or something like that.
So, the message is this:
If you know someone,
you can never hate them.
And when I don't hate them,
I accept their humanity.
I'm starting to want to learn about their religions.
I started to read about Islamic culture,
read about their religion.
And I understand some of it.
But the more important is that something that I don't understand,
I accepted it as what it is.
If you look into the eyes of someone,
you will know that we are all human first
and something else later.
It's easy to say about someone who lives far away
and doesn't have any conflicts directly with us.
How's about this?
If you look at the news,
this is after the protest of Red Shirts in Bangkok five years ago.
Many of you may cheer for them
Many of you may hate them.
If you look into the news, you'll only see this.
But as a documentary maker,
I try to go to every protests
happening in Bangkok or somewhere else in Thailand,
not to agree or disagree or argue with them politically,
but to know them, to understand them
to have a meal with them.
I see a lot of stuff.
I see that people getting tired,
and they stay out there on the street all night and all day.
And they said to me
they're fighting for what they believe in,
no matter you agree upon it or not.
And I went there with fear and some hatred in my heart
because it's been going on for a while
and I wonder what it's all about.
I have to go see that.
I was worrying somebody's going to hit me in the head or something.
What happens is that a lady invited me to share a meal with her,
a Red Shirt lady.
And we just sat there,
a couple of Red Shirts eating sticky rice.
No politics.
They get tired.
You don't get to see this on the news.
They have spa in front of the protests.
They're out there all day, all night.
And few years later, I went to other protests.
PDRC protest,
which is supposed to be the polar opposite of the Red Shirts protests.
And one day I see
exactly the same thing
on Ratchadamnoen Road.
You don't get to see this on the news.
In the tear gas fight, I was there.
You can only see the violence,
but I get to see is that a man, very calmly,
came to me, gave me some water,
trying to wash away the tear gas in my eyes,
and asked me if I am okay or not.
If you watched the news, you would only see this.
So,
this reminds me of a quote I read a long time ago in Rwanda,
in the museum, it says,
"If you really know me and you really know yourself,
you will not have killed me."
And how much do you get to choose?
I want you to think long and hard about this.
How much do you get to choose who you are?
How much do you get to decide what is right and wrong in your life
by your own thought?
And how much is decided by your culture, your nationality,
the place you were born in,
the generation you born into -
your parents, your wealth, your education -
something you have totally no control whatsoever?
If you don't have any control over those factors
that contribute to the ideas
of what being right and wrong in your life,
how can you blame others for having different ideas?
So coming back to the question I propose in the beginning of this talk.
"How not to hate?"
Well, my simple advice to you is this:
Make your own journey.
Go out into the world.
You don't like a place, go there.
You don't understand someone,
talk to them.
You hate someone - especially them - talk to them.
Get to know them.
Understand them.
That's the journey.
You don't have to go far.
It can be your neighbor.
It can be the gangster in your street.
There's always something you don't know.
There's always something to understand,
something to make all this hatred melted from your heart,
make all of this illusion, all of this misunderstanding blown away,
just because you talk to them
and get to know them.
I want to leave you with not exactly a quote -
I wrote this myself -
but it's something I live according to:
If you see something wrong with the world,
If you can change it,
then by all means, change it.
If you cannot change it,
then try to understand it.
And if you cannot understand it,
then try to accept it.
And then if you still cannot accept it,
ask yourself,
What else can you really do?
Thank you.
(Applause)