COMMENT | Every time I look at a newborn baby, I wonder, "What could go wrong with this one?"

I'm hardly a pessimist when it comes to human nature. Quite the opposite actually.

However, recent events involving political persecutions and acts of terror around the world have had me frustrated with exhaustion, as I keep looking for answers from the world's smartest people - sociologists, philosophers, and intellectuals - who have theorised countless explanations.

One could argue that the reason we see violence so much in the news nowadays is because of our access to technology, while the rate of violence has remained the same (or even decreased) throughout centuries. But then it begs the question, why haven't we evolved in our thinking to put violence to an end?

Extremisms, plural, as talked about by sociologists, come in two main forms, violent and non-violent. But I would argue that any kind of extremism is violent in nature, so there is no such thing as a "non-violent" extremism.

But of course, that is why we have working definitions, so the working definition for non-violent extremism would differentiate those in the extremism spectrum from the "not yet violent" to the "extremely violent" forms of extremisms. You get the picture.

If extremism was a person, and this person was on a journey to discover the wonders of life, that life would begin just like any other person - with the people surrounding them.

Let's give this person a Malaysian identity. He would be a boy raised in an urban but rather racially homogenous city, in one of the more developed states of the country.

Extremism would grow in a household that believes in the racial supremacy of one race over other races. Even though his parents are highly educated, they make him believe that his race is under attack, politically and economically.

When he becomes a teenager, he would go to his place of worship every week, and occasionally the sermons would be about how his religion is under attack.

The education Extremism received in schools would teach him that girls are always subordinate to boys because the religion says so. Extremism would learn that when he grows up and marries a girl, he could beat his wife if she displeases him, and he could divorce his wife as easily as he could cut butter with a knife.

Extremism is now a man with wives and children. He would now perpetuate the same cycle of extremism in the next generation.

Until somebody wakes Extremism up from this line of thinking, and provides counter-narratives to Extremism, those with less power will always be under the tyranny of those with an abundance of it...