This brief passage by Sam Harris continues to impact how I view a lot of the world's complexity and conflicts.

"Belief motivates behavior. Bad ideas are a far bigger problem than bad people. Fortunately, bad people are quite rare. A bad person is someone who is physiologically disposed to do harm, something akin to bad brain wiring, or genetically determined sociopathic tendencies where the person derives actual pleasure from inflicting harm and is unable to feel empathy. These people do exist, and given the lack of free will, we should feel pity for them while safeguarding society from them. But what is far more common is that a perfectly good person has bad ideas. Bad software running on good hardware. We must persuade through argumentation. It's conversation or violence."

Peter T.