One of the things that man is capable of is rationalization. Man can tell himself that what he is doing is appropriate and correct and then come up with reasons why it is correct. To that man who is doing it, it all seems rational and in line with the way things are. That’s why it’s called rationalization.
We take what we think is rational. We take what we think is appropriate standards and apply it to our situation and find comfort in the fact that we’re doing what’s OK, or that what we are doing is OK or what we intend to do is OK. These standards are often applied to qualities that don’t belong to Allah, yet we find, and we conjure up ways to give reasoning to ourselves that even though they aren’t the qualities that apply to Allah, they are OK in this instance. They are OK in this case. They are OK for the following reason.
For instance, some people know they are arrogant but they excuse their arrogance because they believe that they need it in order to move forward on what they are doing. They consider it the driving force that allows them to continue in their work, and their work is very important. Because their work is very important, they are allowed to step on people and they are allowed to push people out of the way, and they are allowed to do things that would otherwise be forbidden because the goal is so important.
In the world, in most revolutionary movements, the goal is so important that you are given permission to kill people. You are given permission to overthrow governments. You are given permission to cause chaos because what you are doing is not causiong chaos, what you are doing is creating the petri dish for the growth of a new kind of understanding, for the growth of a new millenium that will be better than the previous one and will incorporate all good things.
In Cambodia this rationalization finally came to place during the Red Brigade in Cambodia that they had to kill (yes, the Khmer Rouge,) that they had to kill everybody from the previous generation that had been tainted by the old way in order to create a new way. This became referred to as “The Killing Fields” and they went about trying to do this. It became their rationalization and their reason for doing it. And they believed they were right…
