O P I N I O N – P H I L O S O P H Y
Adwiteeya Rupantee Paul
What causes problems like ethnic cleansing, communal strife, and other social malaises? This article may help cleanse your mind, put two of your contrasting personalities into a never-ending strife, or simply make you feel that the society has been malfunctioning in too many ways for you to spend time pondering over these (which, I suppose, have already crossed your mind).
The first point to comprehend is that, at this very moment, we exist in an immensely complex form of a society, which our ancestors had never imagined. The human brain is a complicated tool, it contradicts itself every single second. An individual’s opinion on a specific issue is a result of multiple things going on in their brain — their experience, their emotions, their assumptions, etc. It questions itself a number of times and then provides an output. Contrasting experiences and emotions must take time to align. So, when someone approves of something after genuinely considering everything they have in their mind, it marks the end of a long process.
If opining about something is this complex, imagine what happens when two people agree on something. It is basically the result of their partially or completely different experiences, emotions, and assumptions coming into an alignment, which can be considered a rarity provided the variety of underlying factors. So, if only two people agreeing on something is this complex, imagine how tough the formation of a whole ideology can be. No matter how much we hate a certain ideology, we shouldn’t miss the chance to wonder how beautifully the scattered thoughts of people had aligned before its formation.
We should put emphasis on “the process” of something, rather than the “ramifications”. That’s what allows us to see the beauty in it.
When an ideology is established for the first time, it stays confined to just a single group of people. The first few civilisations of the world we find in history books, had contrasting ideologies of their own, and they had been progressing in their own way.
So, when did racial brutality start? Of course, it’s when different races came to interact. And that’s when their intransigence and dubious brains combinedly created a barrier in accepting the differences.
Where does this intransigence originate from?
Think of ideologies as galaxies — all their rituals or basic concepts resemble the stars. With the advancement of time, many of these rituals turn into black holes — worn out, yet massively impacting the gravitational field. People forget how they originated and overlook its essence and mostly concentrate on the conclusions they have to offer. These bases of an ideology thus lose their own identity and turn into something massive and dark. They no longer brighten up human conscience. You don’t realise how much affected you are going to be if you blindly keep following this black hole until you get lost in its centre, and boom, you’re now the black hole. This is how people become their ideology.
An ideology doesn’t care if it’s right or wrong, it just stays. Similarly, people stop using the complicated tool they have inside their skull and remain stuck. All their experiences, emotions or assumptions, no longer retain their individuality.
When someone questions the ideology of these blind individuals, they feel like their identity is being questioned. This results in intransigence.
However, ideologies are not just full of black holes. An ideology, unlike a blind human being, never transforms into its black holes. An ideology can both compel and impel a person, and so it’s important to learn the difference. Not all stars turn into black holes. You can’t simply dismiss a galaxy. In a community, the pathetic effects of black holes can somewhat be redeemed by the bright stars. These stars didn’t lose their identity because they weren’t as complex as the ones that died. This lack of complexity helped people realise and remember their essence for a longer period of time.
So, where are we now?
As time passed, with the coexistence of different races, black holes, and brains have attained co-existence as well. Racial brutality still exists, but it can’t be denied that the brutality has lessened to some extent; or perhaps people have simply learned to hide their black holes. Occasionally, these black holes win over their brains and burst into what some of us consider beautiful fireworks, while the others consider them deadly explosives.
What’s the point of discussing all this?
I have previously mentioned that our ancestors had never imagined their successors to end up enmeshed in this complex network of multiple ideologies. Now we have the internet which has not only connected people, but also their black holes and brains. The internet is regularly contributing to the development of both of these. Brains and black holes stand as reactants and products of a reversible reaction — never reaching the equilibrium and constantly destroying each other and losing their individuality.
In the course of evolution, we are the upgraded versions of our ancestors. They had let their own brain cells fight, and after a long time, they had produced an output. However, later on, they made the mistake of forgetting how they formed the ideologies and its main essence — leading to the formation of black holes. They created the stars, as well as the black holes, which still run in our blood.
At this point of time, each of us, as humans, need to stop deifying our ideologies and focus more on their histories. We should study different perspectives of viewing a certain ideology — perspectives of people who never had faith in it and at the same time, who have had a blind faith in it. We should let our conscience judge which one we like the most. We should start the way our ancestors started: combining our own experiences, assumptions, and emotions and letting our brain fight with it to produce an output. That’s what will reflect who we truly are. We are our own selves, not black holes. We should let these black holes be reborn as stars, and even though that might be impossible in a galaxy, it’s not impossible in a human brain. Our minds are much more diverse than constellations. We have to ensure that we exist, that we pass down our intellect to the next generations, not the black holes. We ourselves are the solutions to the problems we have created and it’s high time we realised it.
Since most of us are accustomed to jumping into conclusions without viewing the actual beauty of the process of the formation of an opinion, I’d like to make it simpler by directly telling you what I want you to do. For the sake of human existence and development, let your own brain work. Do not simply approve of what your family, society, state or even the globe has to tell you on a certain issue. You can create your own ideology, or your own version of the ideology that people from different corners of the world have absorbed in different points of time of history. Let your individuality be expressed. Recognise yourself; ask questions; learn your own constellations. You have no idea what power you hold in yourself.
The success of a human doesn’t lie in the money they make or the fame they earn. It’s in learning the art of knowing oneself. Once you know yourself, you’ll never relinquish. And neither will the human kind, to any form of black hole.
Adwiteeya is a random kid who gets super soft if someone spells her name right — ’cause it’s a rarity, as you can tell.