I get depressed about the state of the world. Not just the
balance of terrible to good things in the world, which may or may not be
getting better, but it’s source…us, our instincts, behaviors,
brain-functionings that lead to that good or bad. I’m afraid we can’t really
change. Our tribalism, fear and distrust of others, desire for cultural power,
our general unawareness of our limited ability to perceive or even be aware of
the larger experiences of the many, many cultures and people and how that
unknowingly leads to seeing our own world and our experience as default or more
valuable, our initial instinctive response of anger when our views are
challenged, our hurt and fear from even needed change that holds us back, our
inability to see and respond to long-term consequences as real risks, our
misunderstandings of others’ minds and even our own personal psychology.
These things are all instinctual, but overcoming them,
managing them, living with them, controlling them, requires a level of
self-awareness that itself may have inborn limits within each individual. We
can expand our understandings through education, expand our experiences
interacting with others, we can learn to be more self aware and reflective of
our own feelings and actions…but enough to matter? Enough of a scale to shift the
population far enough from all the harm we do, have done for our entire existence?
What if some us are just simply better or worse at doing this self-reflective
growth than others? What if the average across the population is not really all
that good at any of this, even if they want to be?
I believe most people mean well. I believe most people want
to do “good” and thus change is not entirely impossible. I don’t discount too
many people as entirely unreachable and uncaring. But changing the world rest
on people’s ability for personal growth and awareness of others. We can’t
impose that change on others, can’t make them aware if they don’t know how to look,
and so we have to rely on them to figure it out, trust that they can do it. We
can help people along, if they’re willing, put our representation in front of
them, protest in ways they can’t just ignore, try to change laws and policies…but
people, ourselves included, still have to be aware of our own limited perspective
to understand what we’re seeing. We have to be aware of our own blind spots, our
own tribalism, our own desire for power, our own limited perspective, our own
instinctive and unanalyzed responses. Or else we’ll just keep creating new
oppressions, new harmful social norms, new exclusionary cultures blind to how we’re
marginalizing new “others”.
And I no longer think most people are capable of that level
of self awareness and self critique.
Activists for one social issue, completely clueless that
they are behaving towards another group or issue exactly as they criticize
their own ideological opponents for, people pushing for social change but then demanding
the same level of unquestioning ideological purity and rigidity as the thing
they’re fighting against, dismissing all criticism as oppression or bias as if
there is only ever one correct interpretation or strategy with no room for
discussion, the expectation that people can and should accept an opinion
without acknowledging the intellectual and personal emotional struggle it takes
to really understand and live that view, that simply being told is the same as
thinking about it, that shame and emotional coercion are acceptable ways to
change people’s minds and not simply a form of power-based/top-down social
control (or worse yet, that this type of power-based social control is acceptable
as long as the “right” side wields it), the implication that caring about
people’s feelings is a zero-sum-game where caring about the “unapproved” group’s
feelings means you must not care about the “approved” group’s or just don’t
even understand the issues in question.
These are the
interpersonal behaviors that lead to so much harm in the world, so much uneven
balances of power, so much oppression, marginalization, and just general
unintentional ignorance-based hurt. And I realize now everyone does these
things: right side, wrong side, other’s sides…my side. My side may have better ideas, may even have a better
understanding of the root of so many social problems, may be a little better at
listening, ended up living around a higher diversity of views that they could
incorporate into their own understanding…but we can’t experience everything and
we can’t simply rely on experiences to passively inform us of everything we
need to know to understand and accept others; we still need to analyze
ourselves, and deep down, we’re still a collection of people spanning the same terrible
range of self awareness, following the same basic instincts as everyone else.
And that’s what I find depressing about the state of the world.
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