"It's not personal. It's strictly business." - Michael Corleone
I heard this quote the other day, and it, unlike any other, reminded me of the underside and fundamental truth of human nature like no other quote does. In the past year, I have learned, on a level I never could have before, that any slights, grudges, or animosity people hold against you tend to be more about them than it tends to be about you personally. If someone hates you for having loving, present, and kind parents, it tends to be because of their own family history. I know I have felt that way towards people with more privileged family histories than myself in the past. And in that case, it was always more about me than it was about them. It was always not personal. It was about me, and it was just what I did to survive.
As such, I have to remind myself that when people hold similar grudges towards me, it tends to be more about them than it is about me. I have been reminded by others that people simply have personal experiences that lead them to avoid me in the present. It's not personal. It's just their survival and adaptive mechanism, which is something I simply have to respect.
No one likes holding grudges against others, ostracizing or wholly avoiding someone or an entire group of people. But it is simply human nature to resolve to mitigate emotional difficulty and risk. Biologically and anthropologically, it has been confirmed that human nature simply ostracizes and casts aside people who transgress moral code as a means of enforcing that code. Social isolation has been proven by the anthropologist Richard Wrangham as a fundamental means of pain to force people into following that code. Few people want to do it, but they do in order to better the good of the community and whole rather than the good of the individual.
"When the group coalesces around a new code, they will crush anyone who breaks it. It's not personal," Wrangham told an NPR interviewer. "It's just what humans do."
Perhaps the line that "it's just what humans do" represents something that isn't so positive as a by-product of corporate America that corporatizes a "the means justify the ends" mentality.
People say "it's nothing personal, it's just business." It comes when a corporate official has bad news that tells an employee he or she is laid off or fired. It's a line that's meant to let someone off the hook and exonerate the situation, as a means of dehumanizing the individual and making something difficult easier.
As such, I know that most things in screwing someone over and robbing them of their humanity are just business. It's just what people do. It's not personal in the slightest.
But that doesn't mean I have to like it or that you have to like it. And it doesn't mean that society has to stand by the mentality of "it's not personal, it's just what people do." It is a byproduct of capitalist, bourgeoisie hustle culture that prioritizes money, productivity, and business at the expense of humanity.
In the words of Jon Ronson, the author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed, "I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain." And the sentiment behind "it's not personal, it's just what people do" is an oversimplification and way of making our lives easier, a way of saving ourselves and making others voiceless.
It's hard to love people who are liabilities and make us unpopular. It's hard to take care of people and look after them when no one else wants to do so. But, in Christianity, the mark of how much you love people is how much you love your enemies, and if you see anyone who has the capacity of being a liability and making life difficult as being your enemy, then loving those people is the mark of your humanity and character.
Let us not make pariahs and excuse ourselves by saying, "it's not personal, it's just what people do," or "it's not personal, it's just how things are," and go the extra mile in granting compassion and empathy.
