Nobody's Born Hating Their Neighbour

For a long time I thought the Buddha's stuff was just about sorting your own head out. Don't be a greedy prick. Don't be a hateful bastard. Don't believe every stupid thing you read. Seemed pretty straightforward. A personal checklist for when you wake up at three in the morning and your brain is being a dickhead.

Then the world stopped making sense.

Greed, hatred and delusion weren't just personal fuck-ups anymore. They had been baked into the systems that run the show. A Zen teacher called David Loy makes this argument better than I can: the Buddha named the poisons as roots inside a person, and those same roots can be built into an economy, a political system, a media machine. The Buddha wasn't describing a bad mood. He was describing an engine, and Loy's point is that it runs at both sizes, the personal kind and the big systemic kind.

The three poisons, institutionalised.

This is what those three poisons look like when you stop treating them as personal problems and start reading them as architecture.

I used to think greed was just a character flaw. Some people want too much. End of story. But the older I get, the more it looks like a relationship with the world that got severed somewhere along the way. There was a version of enough that made sense. What you have been given is enough. What you have been given deserves respect. That was not a sermon. It was the baseline. The quiet assumption that sat underneath the work, the meal, the exchange.

The system we now live inside runs on the opposite instinct. Take everything. Value nothing. Call it growth.

This is greed at scale. The hunger that feeds on itself. It does not stop. It cannot stop. It is a fire that consumes what it touches. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the hours we sell, the attention we fragment. All of it flowing upward into a belief that enough is not a real place. That the only responsible thing to do is want more.

The system trains you to believe the emptiness is yours. If you just worked harder. If you just optimised harder. If you just wanted it more. But the bucket is designed to stay empty. That is the mechanism. Not your laziness. Not your lack of vision. The fucking architecture itself.

I do not need to name a politician to describe what happens when a society learns to turn people into them. You take a group. You strip them of their humanity. You use fear as fuel. You call it strength.

The Buddha called this hatred. The poison that makes us see another person as a category, a threat, an obstacle to our survival. And in the modern world it has been industrialised. Algorithms amplify our worst assumptions. Media models sell us outrage because outrage holds attention better than empathy. Political machines grind human complexity into binary teams and tell us the other side is not just wrong. They are evil.

Nobody is born hating their neighbour.

That takes training.

That takes funding.

That takes a screen.

And the poison works because it feels like self-protection. The mind says: if I can just hate the right people, I will be safe. But hatred is a rigged poker machine. It pays out just enough to keep you pulling the lever, and it empties your pockets while you play. The house always wins. The house is the system that needs you divided to keep extracting.

If greed is what we want, and hatred is who we blame, delusion is what we see. Or rather, what we stop seeing.

Buddhism calls this delusion. The old Zen line for it is mistaking the finger for the moon. In the modern world, delusion has been engineered. The attention economy runs on your confusion. It profits from your rage, your anxiety, your half-certainty. It feeds you fragments until reality itself becomes a matter of opinion. The algorithm does not want you calm. It wants you reactive. A reactive mind is a predictable consumer.

This is the fog machine. The endless scroll that fragments your attention until you cannot remember what you believed yesterday. The manufactured uncertainty that makes solidarity impossible because we no longer share a common ground.

And the deepest delusion is the one that tells you this is just how it is. That the world has always been this chaotic. That there is no alternative. Buddhism would call that a lie. The confusion is not natural. It is cultivated. It is the soil in which the other two poisons grow.

Greed needs you hungry.

Hatred needs you scared.

Delusion needs you confused.

Together they form a closed loop. A machine that runs on human suffering and calls it the free market, or national security, or engagement metrics.

So what the fuck can we do?

This is where a lot of engaged Buddhism goes soft. It diagnoses beautifully and then says: meditate more. As if the answer to structural evil is a better morning routine. That is not what this is.

The path against greed is generosity, and generosity is the resistance. Give your time, your money, your attention to things that do not scale. To people who cannot repay you. To the part of your life that the economy calls unproductive. Buddhism teaches that generosity cuts the knot of greed. Charity that cleans your conscience while leaving your greed intact is not the medicine.

The path against ill will is not pretending everyone is lovely. Loving-kindness is a hard stance dressed in soft language. It says: I will not turn you into a cartoon, even if you have turned me into one. I will see the fear behind your hatred without excusing the harm you do.

This is kindness with a spine. It does not mean you let people walk on you. It means you refuse to become the thing you claim to hate. The enemy is not the other voter, or the other protester, or the other parent at school. The enemy is the machine that needs you to see each other as enemies. The only way to starve it is to keep your humanity intact.

The path against delusion is information fasting. Clear seeing as a survival skill. The Buddha included a precept against intoxicants. Today, the most dangerous intoxicant is the feed. The scroll. The constant drip of panic and opinion that was designed to make us stupider and angrier.

You do not need to have an opinion on everything. You do not need to know the latest outrage to be a good person. You need enough clarity to see what is actually in front of you. To know the difference between a real threat and a manufactured one. To recognise when your attention is being farmed. A mind that asks who benefits from me believing this.

You are not a saint because you read an essay and felt noble for ten minutes. The Buddhist path inside collapse is smaller and harder than that. It is the daily choice to stay human in a machine that needs your dehumanisation to keep running.

It is the choice to refuse the hustle when the hustle asks you to abandon your body. It is the choice to speak to the cashier like a person when the system treats them as a function. It is the choice to sit with your own discomfort rather than reaching for the phone to numb it. These are tiny rebellions. They do not make the evening news. But they are the only resistance that changes the soil instead of just pruning the branches.

Empires built on extraction consume their own foundations eventually. The fire consumes itself. The algorithm will eat the attention it farms until there is nothing left to farm. Impermanence applies to systems as well as bodies.

Your job is not to stop the storm. Your job is to refuse to become the storm. Keep your eye clear, your heart stubbornly soft, and your feet planted in the part of life where the bullshit doesn't survive. That is the dharma. That is the practice. That is the only way through.

The shelter is built one refusal at a time. One kindness. One breath. One clear-eyed moment when you choose to stay human, and invite the person next to you to do the same.

Peace, Love, and Profanities

(The frame in this piece comes from David Loy, whose essay "The Three Poisons, Institutionalized" is well worth your time)