It takes a global village to raise a better world than we currently sustain
I’m up at six in the morning, on the second Saturday of the Freedom Convoy demonstration in downtown Ottawa. I should be sleeping in, I want to, but I’ve been disturbed of late, more than I usually am. I’ve tried my usual meditations, I’ve tried shutting off, ranting out, reading up on everything that’s been unfolding to burn myself out of this restless helplessness and fall into a blissful slumber. Nothing’s really working.
Instead, I’ve been racing from one thought to another, drawing up parallels and making inferences based on an uncounted number of uncomfortable, unwelcome experiences — personal, anecdotal, and factual.
None of this was unexpected. And all of this was avoidable.
I’m beyond exhausted by what the last few years have magnified. We are a global village deeply divided over bold borders that could easily be erased with a stroke of a pen. But we are sliding down a slippery slope, spiralling out of control with every word communicated through text or speech, mired in mutual distrust.
I’ve partly blamed social media for it. However, just like the pandemic, it’s a contagion that has brought ugliness to the forefront from the bowels of our mostly unspoken thoughts, and we can’t stop vomiting it out compulsively. For years we have relied on risky whispers and casual confident confessions to those we’ve long considered our confidants, rarely venturing to the other side to challenge their different, “wrong” worldview. And it almost worked.
As three-dimensional beings in a multidimensional world, we often fall back on a version of reality that makes most sense to us, and moreover, one that does not trigger our fears of the unknown. After all, there’s nothing scarier than not knowing. It makes us feel vulnerable and insignificant to be caught in a lie. But, at the same time, too much knowledge also makes us feel the same.
So, we find a comfortable middle ground between accepting an existential reality that rightfully reduces us to a bunch of vibrating atoms immeasurably interacting with a simultaneously microcosmic & macrocosmic universe, and a total fantasy where nothing is real except ourselves.
This middle ground is only possible through the active participation of all our available senses with a passive participation of our intangible thoughts. However, we only know to regulate our senses through willful denial, measured escapism, and half-truths that are mirrored by our surroundings. Otherwise, we risk a sensory overload that could shut our systems down.
Before social media, we were comparatively isolated in our subcultures and various economic, religious, and political cults — relying on the old media to bring us opinions and news from across our cities, countries, continents, and the world. We were comfortable in our circles of prejudicial group think, endlessly validating ourselves through rituals and rhetoric shared by those we considered one of our own in our communal mindscapes wherever we lived and worked.
We’d define what is ideal based on what resonated most with the lies we told ourselves. This meant maintaining a fragile socio-economic/religious/political system that had a common, lofty goal of making all our dreams come true and taking all our woes away.
It was easier to disown or disengage from the odd outlier in our bubble — they were an aberration, an anomaly, and an insult to our ancestors. The moment a rogue thread started unravelling our delicate fabric of shared reality, we chose to burn it at the seams and hide the threat away from our conscious thoughts.
To cope with this trauma, we’d resort to ranting about the devils responsible for brainwashing our beloveds into joining their evil cult of other isms, mourning this insurmountable loss of a part of us with those who shared our pity. We’d also turn to our various little addictions — both diagnosed and undiagnosed, individual, and social — pairing these activities with a fair chunk of internal battles against whatever wicked thoughts the ordeal whispered in our minds, doubling down on repetition of the many mantras that brought us back to a stoic state and hid our scars behind our social masks again every morning.
And just like that, everything wrong in the world was made somewhat right again.
This was made even easier because the only times we really confronted with the other side was when we’d go through the newspaper or watch a news clip on a specific time slot, passed by an individual, demonstration or a gathering, or discussed it by water coolers and on obscure chat rooms. There were no constant reminders of the different, not in our homes, not in our beds, not on our toilet seats, not right after sex, not at the dinner table or wherever we went.
Then came social media — as a magical tool to scratch that itch at the back of the mind. These limited conversations weren’t enough, we needed to connect with more likeminded individuals, to justify our thoughts and feelings — whatever they might be. And we did, still in moderation, still on computers and now primitive mobile phones — exploring our various intersecting and overlapping interests, sharing what was on our mind with measured risk.
At first it was cosmetic — relationship or sports drama, the odd opinion on current affairs. But we evolved soon enough alongside the more intuitive smartphones, guided by an algorithm that parsed through our various permutations and combinations like an omniscient being privy to the unconscious biases that we never reflected upon beyond stolen glances in the mirror or an intrusive thought.
Seamlessly, as our perception of time morphed with our fragmented attention, we formed a symbiotic relationship with the algorithm — wittingly and unwittingly engaging in this feedback loop of psychosocial evolution. Just like energy can neither be created nor destroyed, the information flow was never one way, in this binary co-dependence, not only did the algorithm inform our thoughts based on how our actions informed it, but we also informed its knowledge and actions with our own confuddling biases, not to mention our willful participation in this existential exercise — trading the sanity and security of our self-image for instant gratification of our fleeting feelings — for the price of an ad dollar.
The result? An infinite scroll with infinitesimal bits of information constantly re-arranging itself to best appeal to our desires established a toxic bond where we became enslaved to this omnipresent djinn that made all our wishes come true with a click or two. However, the algorithm and those who profit off it, understood well enough that this interpersonal relationship between our minds and this meta-mind wasn’t permanent without our need for object permanence, and that came only with our sense of community.
And nothing underlines a communal feeling more potently than othering. We thrive in our tribal, primal ecosystems through an unnatural evolutionary chimaera of ant-like drone thinking and elephant-like emotional intelligence, twisted with handicaps of both without the true strengths of either.
When we first came down the trees and straightened our spines to stretch the spheres of our nourishment beyond what was immediately available, we ventured into the vast unknown of the world in packs — defending ourselves against external threats through the strength of numbers, knowledge of those who foraged something new and survived, and the ingenious resilience of those who built tools from our scavenging to thrive. These different outcomes of our apprehensive curiosity kept us alive, and we relied on the guidance of those who knew better than us and had more experience than us.
Without it, we’d succumb to a predator or a plant. We needed to be obedient, and we needed to stay close to those who were like us. Otherwise, we’d wander into the world and get lost. That feeling of isolation was scary, because we didn’t know what would happen, we didn’t have reassurance against that fear. We could fight and flee in numbers like all other animals, but alone we’d be frozen by circumstance and fall prey to this unknown force.
Following that line of thinking, we listened to our elders when they interpreted these unknown forces to mitigate the outcomes more efficiently. We understood the patterns of nature and its visible duality through our limited lenses, through our relatable realities. But before we could realise the plurality of our reality, we had enshrined what we knew in stone — and put it on an altar for all to know and follow for a better, safer, comfortable life. Before long we got caught in the discoveries of our capabilities, externalising our evolution through tools of trades that fulfilled our needs and filled the empty spaces of boredom with wants wrought out of the boundless world.
As we grew in number and prominence, and prolonged our lives, we doubled down on what we knew to anticipate whatever is to come in the ever scary tomorrow, becoming ever more confident and complacent about the dangers of the unknown, carefully expanding the event horizons of our echo chambers that reflected our loud opinions, and collapsed all contradictions in the abyss of our worldview from where we birthed what seemed like better versions of our reality.
Any aberration in this perfect sphere caused severe distress, activating our genetic and social wiring of fearing the unknown, and being wary of the new. The same ancient coda directed us towards instantly gratifying ourselves to suppress this arresting terror, teaching us to fight — through words or hands — whatever was against our preciously guarded perception of reality.
And once we reached a point where the threats of the natural world were no longer greater than us, we made the mistake of not realising that the generations of primal formula coded in our genes needed an outlet. In absence of a tangible threat, we turned on the deviant notes within our echo chambers — dealing with the cognitive dissonance by cannibalising ourselves. Now, anything that was different became suspiciously dangerous — a different gender, a different age, a different orientation, a different attire, a different social behaviour that breaks our monolithic interpretation of reality. It all had to go or cede to our version of the truth.
We either cannibalised, subjugated, or ostracised these abnormalities. And these abnormalities, still having the same primal requirement to survive through tribality, dissociated from our reality to establish their own reality, fracturing, and fragmenting and fractalizing what was once unanimous into a variety of cultures created through overlapping subcultures of the physical, the emotional, the mental, and the metaphysical. These differences disturbed our sensitive isolated systems by bringing in unknown variables to the overall outcome, becoming ever more a threat than whatever we had learned to face so far like natural disasters, and predators. We looked ever inwards to rope these fraying threads into ordered binds of economic, religious, and political laws that gave us an upper hand in this never-ending tug of war.
But there were always times that threw a wrench in our self-proclaimed perfect symptoms, times that made us distrust each other beyond the multitudes of manufactured divisions. Plagues. We couldn’t anticipate them, and we couldn’t fully control them. Symptoms of plague showed in others around us, and our predominant biases gave us false conclusions that it is due to the others that we must suffer this immediate threat to life. We hypothesised that it is due to something they did that is happening to us. We naturally turned to the past in these times as well, and on the wisdom of those around us that we trust who had lived through testing times.
It didn’t matter how seemingly improbable the cure sounded — it was something familiar, and familiar was comforting, familiar didn’t make us feel isolated, familiar shielded us from being exposed to the unknown. Part of this familiar was to huddle together against this unknown even if the unknown was amongst us invisibly. We thought that our invisible gods would protect us surely, or that nature would run its course and those who remain will start fresh again, those who remain were meant to remain as a reward for their virtue. And if that wasn’t sufficient, we’d break all norms and let loose our unconscious, repressed feelings — often fulfilling our need for community through psychosocial plagues of abnormal behaviours. Once this period of existential threat was over, we’d cope with our collective trauma by reinforcing all that came before it.
Fast forward to the now, and we are inhabiting a world without physical borders — capable of travelling from one corner of the earth to another overnight nearly as easily as watching each other on a screen from any part of the planet.
But not all of us can afford to.
We are caught in a cycle of compulsive consumption, turning luxuries into necessities while our economic disparity grows ever wider, making necessities that were once guaranteed to all tribes within their own bubbles into ever fleeting luxuries that are almost impossible to ground without cannibalising each other in some shape or form. Still designed to rely on those who have gone beyond the threat and those who insure us against threats, we gravitate towards role models — of religion, philosophy, economics, politics, technology, and leisure — to immunise ourselves.
Amidst all this, we are constantly exposed to the “other” through social media and the internet. This “other” is present everywhere, and at all times, even in our dreams as a nightmarish replay of scattered memories gathered in unconscious recollection. We cannot help ourselves from fleeing into the comfort of our various cults and combat the “other” through the safety of our homes. The instant gratification of round the clock entertainment is not enough in this siege. After all, unrestrained rage is more delicious and long lasting than the taste of anything else that easily fades from tongue and thought.
In comes the COVID pandemic, a next generation of the primordial unknown threat, jumping from body to body through the single-most unconscious and vital part of our existence — our breaths. It’s origins dubious, it’s initial handling equally suspect — we take all the pre-existing crises of culture, economics, identity, ideology, and the climate, and magnify our scattered points of view through a discordant, ever contradicting stream of mind-numbing chatter, isolated from fully engaging our senses in that vital community space, resorting to “othering” each other through the internet.
In all this, we ignore the most basic and most effective survival skill that we discovered right at the beginning of our evolution as a species — the objective, scientific method of constantly disproving our own hypotheses and biases, to refine the truth, to isolate every variable and achieve equilibrium through sound conclusions that combine multiple points of view into one seamless prismatic light that shines on the safest path forward.
Unlike the past, when we couldn’t escape the lack of information and the overwhelming influence of indoctrination, we have all the scientific knowledge and prowess to both stop the physical plague of the virus and the psychological plague of intentional, arrogant, defensive ignorance.
But all-science is not a wishful figment of our minds that can protect us from all dangers on its own. No, science requires surrendering our egos and introspecting the deepest, most repressed, and shameful parts of ourselves that hinder us from fully harnessing its potential. And that means we will need to stop being in denial and start being honest with ourselves.
We need to call out this injustice wherever we see it, especially within our circles of trust. Indoctrination is the result of our compliance to the intersecting ideologies that obfuscate our objective reality.
The only way we can escape the climate crisis and the ever-looming constant conflict is by evolving beyond our biases and celebrating the complexity of our species through the lens of existential science.
To achieve that, we must guarantee necessities and equal rights for all so that there is space to introspect and reflect on our inner and outer dialogues beyond the constant fear response of survival that is “othering”.
To get to that stage, we will have to hold all our existing religious, political, and social institutions to account for all their injustices, in a mutual quest to weed out everything that hasn’t worked for our collective betterment and replace it with holistic, science-informed, empathy-driven, sustainable, and equitable ecosystems that explore the human body, the planet it lives on, and the universe with unfiltered, untarnished, and balanced curiosity.
And in order to do that, we in turn need to admit that most of what we have achieved so far as a species has been inherently destructive and diabolical towards ourselves, and the planet we live upon.
We need to accept the actual reality of our unsustainable existence even if it throws us into a panic.
We need to admit when we are wrong and return to the drawing board together before we erase everything in our futile quest to escape the fear of nothingness.
Six hours later, as the clock strikes twelve, I ask a simple question to those of you who have made it to the end: how willing are you to be honest with yourselves?
Share your answers in the comments.
