Russia is fucked up, for instance. China is fucked up. Most of Asia is fucked up. Africa is fucked up. India is fucked up. The Arab world is fucked up. So is Israel. The Western world is quite fucked up and getting worse.
I believe in nonviolence, peace, compassion, equality, solidarity, rationality, trying to find objective truth, freedom and responsibility, human rights and animal rights, patience and self-awareness.
Maybe you do too. Now look at the world around you. Look at the history of human societies. Look at the world outside ‘the democratic, rational Western societies’. And if you live in a 'democratic, rational Western society', look at the people around you. If you believe in the same things I believe in, you are something extraordinary.
Because so far it's been about who kills faster and what this god says and what that god says. So far power has been the only thing that mattered. It’s been about hairy men telling other hairy men to kill other hairy men. Now we’re trying to let things like solidarity, equality and rationality win. We're not always good at them, but at least we see them as something worth striving for. This is something new. This is one of the most amazing steps we’ve ever taken.
Naturally, humans are highly empathetic and altruistic animals. I know that I am, and I know that I'm not a freak of nature. You can already see this in young babies; in studies, most of them prefer the good puppet to the evil puppet. So you'd think that our societies would be empathetic and altruistic too, but unfortunately, we are also capable of violence, ignorance and indifference; we're very good at rationalizing all that in our heads. Especially when we form groups and stop thinking for ourselves. We lie to ourselves to make the problem go away, and that's the reason why it's even possible for the world to be so fucked up in so many ways. "Well, God thinks that..." "Well, that's how it's always been..." "Well, people are selfish so..."
The scary thing is that ‘the democratic, rational Western society’, the whole idea is very new. The fact that people see that as something worth striving for is extraordinary. In many places, the vast majority of people simply don't get what's so special about democracy and equality in the first place. Ancient Egypt existed for 3000 years. The Western world with ideals such as human rights has really existed for about 70 years now, if that. It’s such a fragile concept that when people stop thinking, it disappears.
I don't know. Argh. Most people of my generation think they know who's "too fat" and who's "too skinny", because for some reason they think that that's their business; at the same time, they couldn't give a fuck about the world's problems, because for some reason they think that those are not their business. NOT GIVING A FUCK has become the coolest thing to do, but there's two types of not giving a fuck, and you must always know the difference:
the bad one: not giving a fuck about injustice and the pain of others.
the good one: not giving a fuck about the pressure of social norms and the looks in the eyes of idiots.
Most people of my generation know who Harry Styles is, but they don't really know what happened in the 20th century. And that's why nothing's stopping us from making the same mistakes again.
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti