Another Year.
Another year. Close to a quarter of my life has been lived, but now it feels like someone else has lived through them. There is an otherness I am not able to articulate. I have no control over the things I remember and things that pop into my head in random moments. There a blankness that dwells on me now and then and, there are things that crawl under my skin even in my sleep. In all of it, there is this otherness. An unsuccessful attempt at being someone (or being nothing). It would be quite fascinating spending a life in it but then, the hammer hits the head. And then all the ‘things’ pop in. ‘Things’ that keep telling me of something else, keep indulging me in a never-ending chase for the back of my head.
All this turned quite acute in the past 9 months. The amount of insensitivity, hate, lack of concern for human dignity, and overall indifference I have witnessed this year is enough to nauseate me for some time. But this year has shown me something more important: what distance does to people. Distance, both literally and metaphorically, has burned everything to crisp. The banal and the profound have melted in the same pot, and exclusionary heads of the human race are banging themselves against the wall(Or perhaps not. Which is more horrifying). The niches each of us had built for ourselves in the moving world was, paradoxically, obliterated by distance. Social. Psychological. Economic. And humanity with its abundance of verbose, normative, conforming, role-playing individual, with all the behavioral scripts losing context, had nowhere to hide its deep shallowness. And our shallowness led us to the next best thing, stupidity.
You open your television to catch up on some news. But there is no reporting. Apparently, it’s a show(and no one finds it odd). And there sits an anchor. His eyes are darkened. His movements are weird. He is spewing hate, the pitch of his voice is abnormal. He treating you disinformation on your face. But the anchor is not the problem. It is this: How is it that a person like him comes to operate at the top of the highly selective structure of mass media in a democratic country, who is neither democratic nor competent? And if look at it in relational terms, a further question can be derived: How we as citizens have married our psychological structure with a social structure in such a way so as to flush out lakhs of rupees to a person to nudge communal tribalism in a population day in, day out and be completely ok with it?
This shows our tremendous failure in our ability to state the obvious(more clearly, to agree on the obvious). The internet is personalizing the information ecosystem to each individual with increasing efficiency which is leading us into informational echo chambers, which are these pockets of coherent ecology of information that incompatible with one another. Notice the word ecology. It’s not just another set of facts, but the relations the exist between facts and the people who share them that drive the entire worldview of information processing of an individual within it. Worldviews can be defined as follows:
These are culturally specific belief systems about the world; they contain attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and values about the world. They are assumptions people have about their physical and social realities (Koltko-Rivera, 2004).
When you create competing worldviews that are incompatible with each other, irrationality takes hold which leads inevitably to stupidity. Irrationality is used here in the sense of epistemic blindness that renders us incompetent in the processing of a certain phenomenon. These are errors that stem from a complete lack of underlying conditions of a given situation. And this kind of second-order deception is what makes the problems stated difficult to address. This process can be explained through the concept of ‘kayfabe’ used in professional wrestling. It has been brilliantly explained by Eric Weinstein in this article. I’ll like to end with a poem that hits the point close to the mark:
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.” — Wallace Stevens