We are a nation being crushed under the weight of difficult questions. This article concerns two in particular. Both concern conflict and for both we will find an answer in the same space. First: how can men and women, who have lived unremarkable and therefore largely blameless lives, who fret over graying parents and cradle newborn children in their delighted arms, treat anyone they see as different with either shocking viciousness or sociopathic indifference? Second: how can we be losing a war so badly against militancy after so many years?The first lapse is not due to a lack of formal education, though certainly we lack it. Nor is the second failing due to a lack of resolve, for we have laid down lives both military and civilian in endless red fields and streets, weeping and bleeding but not breaking. Our lack is one of empathy. That gap is not moral in nature; it is a gap in understanding, in knowledge. It is the key to avoiding unnecessary conflicts and to addressing those that cannot be avoided. How can so many people sacrifice their own humanity at the altar of the mob and lynch crying, struggling people, or burn young couples alive in a kiln, deaf to their terrified screams? How can they plan, for months, to kill themselves and every man, woman and child in a mosque? How can they turn a blind eye, every day, to the dispossessed, the desperate and the frightened? Because we forget that others are human. The different become the strange and the strange become the alien. We forget that they are living, complete people. And when we forget this spark of humanity, theirs and our own, we are in the dark. In that tragic blindness, confused, afraid and uncertain, we are capable of acts against fellow human beings that should shake the earth and blot out the sun. There is no cornered animal, however rabid, as dangerous and vile as a man in the darkness with fear in his heart and a weapon in his hand. To forget the humanity of others is to turn our people into enemies and our enemies into bogeymen. There is profit in neither. It would not be possible to be unmoved by the strangling violence against our minorities, the unapologetic declarations of entire religious groups as deserving of death, the slow suffocation of women and the daily animal indignity of being born poor, if we saw these groups of people as fully human. This selective sociopathy, this off-button for empathy that can be so easily engaged when encountering someone different is a holdover from thousands of years ago when only your family and tribe were to be trusted, when an outsider was a harbinger of war or disease. We will continue to be ruled by our ancient, pre-civilised brain until we actively make an effort to wrest control from it by the strength of our will. Here is the underlying secret, laid upon the palm of our hand and hidden only when we make a fist: human beings of any kind are, on average, the same. Individuals can vary wildly but when we speak of a place, a culture, a community they will inevitably possess the same basic needs and wants as any other group of humans, be prey to the same primal fears and respond to the same fundamental motivations. They are largely separated only by the coin toss of their birth, by circumstance, culture and civilisation. This should be an uplifting thought; these are man-made things and we can make and unmake them till we get it right. There is no need, if such a thing is even possible, to reach down into the fundamental depths of human nature and twist. All people (if not persons) anywhere can reach unimaginably noble heights of grace or skulk and snarl in the valleys of depravity. Under the right circumstances they can and will live in fear, rage and heartache, or in joy, contentment and peace. This is what it means to be human. The saints and heroes, devils and monsters exist, and they exist within the human mind that gave those myths form. Do the powers that be have no respect for empathy? Nothing could be further from the truth, at least if respect is interchangeable with fear. Unimaginable energies of will and intellect have been expended over the centuries to reach into the hearts of people and wrench out their empathy. Wherever you see a calculated dehumanisation of someone different, by the petty and by the powerful, you see the fear of empathy. Every piece of jingoistic propaganda, every preacher with fire in his belly and spittle flying from his lips, every military action movie with a near fetishistic obsession with the bravery of “our boys” and the cartoonish evil and incompetence of “the enemy”. Human beings do not like being afraid, and do not like being confused but the world can be a frightening and confusing place. They much prefer self-righteous anger, which is simple, straightforward and far more dangerous than uncertainty. Sell them a nightmarish dream where the witch, the lepers, the blacks, the whites, the foreign hand, the religious minority and the ethnically different are the source of life’s inherent fear and uncertainty, that they are legitimate targets for righteous anger and they will buy it wholesale and beg for more. They always have. Empathy can diffuse the conflicts that should never have been. As for the conflicts that cannot be avoided, we need it there, too. It may seem counterintuitive to say that empathy is a powerful tool against militancy but this is only due to a common misconception: empathy is not the same as sympathy. To empathise is to understand and a lack of empathy does not imply strength or decisiveness, but ignorance. When Sun Tzu implored (or ordered, as it is hard to imagine Sun Tzu imploring anyone for anything) future generals and bankers with delusions of grandeur to “know your enemy and know yourself”, it did not come from a bleeding heart idea of compassion. To effectively fight someone we need to know how they fight, certainly, but also why they fight. Understanding the motivations and circumstances that lead people to join groups like the Taliban and Islamic State (IS) has become unfashionable, conflated with being soft on terrorism. Nonsense. The treatment of any disease, surgical or medical, begins with a diagnosis. And, to extend the metaphor, it is always more efficient to prevent than to cure. We will have to employ violence against those who have joined hands in terrorism; many are beyond the reach of help and redemption but the human cost of letting them become terrorists in the first place is staggering. Tens of thousands of people have taken up the insane and almost certainly suicidal cause of these militant groups, and the odd sociopath here and there simply cannot account for numbers on that scale. To even begin to address the roots of conflict, we must start with the understanding that they are human and respond to human drives, that terrorism is a toxic plant growing, as plants often do, on the rich manure of society, created from desperation, disparity and despair that tomorrow will be any better than today. Starve these groups of these noxious nutrients and they will wither. Empathy, ultimately, is the ability to understand the hearts and minds of other human beings. Like all keys, it is a deceptively small thing. Forge it and we can open a better future. Ignore it and we will remain locked in here, in the dark, where the wild and terrified slashes of the blind will, sooner or later, hit home. The writer is a freelance columnist based in Lahore