Acharya Prashant addresses a question about why we fail to recognize people who commit heinous acts like abuse against children and animals, even when they live among us. He begins by stating that during riots and disturbances, thousands of lives are lost, and the perpetrators are often the same people who, until the day before, were considered civilized, cultured, and gentle members of society. After committing crimes during the riots, they revert to being gentlemen the very next day. He asserts that there are no good people; everyone is a wolf just waiting for an opportunity. He advises that to truly know a person, one must observe them many times, as a single person can have ten or twenty different faces. The speaker explains that the reason we cannot identify these individuals is that, in some way or another, we are just like them. The clean, straightforward, and harsh answer is that these people fit into our definition of 'normal'. They seem normal to us because we consider ourselves normal, and they are just like us. If we are normal and they are like us, then they too become normal. He uses the analogy of a friend: if we are similar to our friend in many shared aspects, we would never call our friend abnormal. How can they be abnormal if they are just like you, and you consider yourself normal? We are shocked when we find that very dangerous criminals emerge from our midst. The speaker elaborates that the tendency for crime exists within us as well. It manifests in some and not in others. We only consider someone a criminal at the gross level, when they have committed the act. The law punishes the act of rape, but not the thought of it. No one is punished for thinking of rape. The law says that until you have committed the crime, you are innocent. You have only thought about it, only planned it, not done it, so you are innocent. We also think, and so does the other person. The difference is they got an opportunity and acted on it, while we did not get the opportunity, so we did not act. The fundamental crime, he explains, is the ego-tendency. Where there is an ego-tendency, there will be desire. Ego means incompleteness, and incompleteness means that to complete oneself, one must have desire. Desire means to exploit the other. The pain of inner incompleteness is so great that to remove it, you are ready to exploit anyone. Exploitation includes all kinds of crimes like theft, robbery, and murder. The fundamental crime is not shooting someone, but the lack of self-knowledge. When you are sitting as an ego from within, that is the fundamental crime. The speaker concludes by outlining the progression of crime: the root is the lack of self-knowledge (root ignorance), from which arises the ego-tendency (incompleteness). From this incompleteness, various other tendencies like lust, anger, greed, and fear are born. From these tendencies come dangerous thoughts, and these thoughts, when given an opportunity, become actions. The crime is not erased until the criminal is erased, and the sin is not erased until the sinner is erased. The name of that criminal, that sinner, is the ego. That ego has to be erased, and the way to do that is through self-knowledge.
