We grow from infancy to childhood, and on that journey we become egocentric.  At first, even drawing a picture from someone else's viewpoint is beyond our comprehension.  But we soon become enabled, and then we begin to realize that we are part of a family and we begin to understand a few mutually reciprocal relationships within our social world.

Growing up is a process of ever expanding our senses of the complexity that we are a part of.  But it gets harder and harder as our personal awareness reaches farther and farther out—as our scope of understanding expands out from our original solipsistic seeing.

Understanding that humamity includes everyone—not just ourselves, our family, our religious compatriots, our national compatriots, our racial look-alikes, etc—is apparently a deep and difficult understanding.  Human rights is a concept that for many seems to be fuzzy mist with no real substance—like the difference between orange and grass green is to a man with no red-sensitive light detectors in his eyes.  In many languages the word for "human" is used to refer only to those who speak that same language...and maybe even no more than a subset of those people.  (During the days after September 11, 2001, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan repeatedly tried to remind America that the attack was "an attack on humanity" and not just "an attack on America."  The Bush Administration and the compliant American media remained deaf to that message and blind to its significance.)

To many, however, he sounds a bit deranged: something seems very wrong with what he said.

To an outsider—or to an insider who understands the logical imperative of human rights—he strikes terror to the heart.  He especially strikes terror if he has great power to kill as he chooses, and kill with impunity.  He dehumanizes and apparently is unaware of what that means.  He fails to sense the abstract meanings in "human" and "human rights," and so his understanding is too shallow to include all that he would interact with.