What’s eating us?

Prelude

I spend a lot of time thinking. I don’t brag or bore people around me, but that’s how I function. Some people want to hold to a 9 to 5 job to feel alive, I prefer thinking. Or rather bombarding myself with boundary questions and exploring answers. I prefer no company and often find myself sufficient to dialogue with. It’s more efficient, got no diplomacy to maintain and much of my time is saved from explaining the basic rules and ethics every time. But then one always faces some version of thinker’s block.  To deal with it, I try to ping a random friend or engage in some public commenting on Facebook. Apart from keeping me grounded, it provides me some very vital components to help me come up with tiny structures that help me write articles, as this one.

Recently I finished reading a book by Philip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? It had been on my bucket list since few years but like many of my books I had deliberately postponed it. It is one of the few books which belongs to a certain category which I define as “dystopian philosophy”. Very few works are available to understand this genre, and unless I had enough mental tools to understand and extrapolate, I preferred delaying the reading. But then I did read it and couldn't help being impressed. I don’t have anyone to ping and discuss the themes though, but that’s another story.

Dystopian Philosphy

We are living in a very interesting era.

• -          Our politics is post truth in nature
• -          Our social values follow populism
• -          Our values are manufactured by marketers
• -          Our laws and labor economics is outwitted by technology
• -          Our stock market is still dependent on crowd sentiments

In fact it has happened quite a lot of times that my friends, in the last couple of months, have been suggesting their plans of dealing with the Indian society, which is suffering from the lack of law and order due to an incapable government which won the hearts of the majority. The plan is as follows:

Leave the country.

Or, ignore the bad news and keep carrying on with one’s usual life.

You know any parallelism? Yeah. Whenever a society is being structurally segregated and communities had to be divided, this attitude among the individuals follow. Such strategies worked during medieval times in South India, during Holocaust, and is being seen amongst my friends in the present times. But my concern is that it’s happening in the present times despite the fact that technology has outwitted the traditional systems and knowledge sharing is capable at the speed of life.

Earlier it was conservative mind set lacking values to empathize with individuals belonging to outside community. Now the situation has changed a little. We are unable to empathize with our very own kinds. Exactly what the book tried portraying in the background. (If you have read the book and want to discuss, drop a message.)

The most enthusiastic guy who gets urge to contribute towards some goodwill of the mankind updates a status or tweet and everything gets diluted and dissipated into the thin air. This is very much similar to what Ravish Kumar, a respected Hindi journalist, tried explaining about the behaviors of Indian politicians who make pathetically amusing statements on Indian values.

So there’s no one to come to the street, to discuss face to face, to walk beside another. If you think you will love to come on road if someone takes the lead, then let me tell you. You won’t. Neither will your friend who talks about women rights and displays old school chauvinistic manners at the party.

This blog has been created to house articles which could be woven later to come up with continental philosophical theories of the coming century. And I suspect the closest term which best describes the contemporary human civilization is dystopia. And there are invisible rules of ethics which creates pattern and claims to make sense and justify actions, also known as the plain continental philosophy.

Vector of human values

Recently I bought a coffee for a Kuwait raised French teacher. She claimed to be deeply caring about human rights and we shared some common thoughts. Then something interesting happened over Facebook when she shared her support for death sentence for rapists, something which I personally don’t support. I tried sharing my views on it, but then she reminds me about our coffee chat where one of the things we agreed jointly was: neither of us feel safe in Delhi metro, despite being crowded and a public place.

This is exactly where I would like you to take a pause. And think.

Who is the culprit if someone feels threatened in a public space?

Is it the criminals who have been existing across all societies in all eras, and are our very own social products?

Is it you yourself, for being so insecure or scared or not strong enough?

It's neither.

The two major factors responsible for this feelings are:

It is the aloofness of our government. The politicians who we choose fail us. And equally guilty are the people who were hired to protect our law and order.

Recently in Rajasthan I saw an upper caste guy at fault slapping a lower caste guy. I as a witness, and around 50 members of his communities, tried filing an FIR. And we F-ing failed. For the next 72 hours I was doing round of the police station yet there was zero action.

People said that this is exactly why they need ST-SC act, which compels police to detain anyone accused by a lower caste member. And I refused to support that. This privilege of “ST-SC act” should be minimum and extended to member of all lower and upper caste.

One often think police is helpless and corrupt. Well, then how does they outperform their own records when crisis falls? Statistically they should perform worse than usual, right? But no. Mumbai supercop Rakesh Maria took a single night to detail the prime suspects of Black Friday.

Now comes the second factor. It’s abstract. You may call me delusional. But I hold it to be more important than government. It’s: apathy of the fellow citizens.

Think about a five star pub in Gurgaon. Once you are inside, no matter if you are a woman, drunk and in skinny clothes, you are not scared. You step out and you get the ugly thoughts creeping inside your head. Why?

More than the aloofness of the government which may prevent us from filing FIR, we are scared of the fellow citizens who will show apathy to our cries if things go bad.

Later they will justify themselves as the victim called the doom upon herself (or himself) or being in that situation in the first place.

I think I have talked enough on the vector arrowheads of the contemporary human values.

Democracy leading to meritocracy

Okay. We got the problem. So what’s the solution?

Well you see I merely think for myself. I am under no compulsion to give solutions. I am already happy to be identifying the problems themselves. But then if you insist…

Well, there are some fundamental flaws at micro as well as macro levels of the society.

At micro level, as an individual, or at the individual level everything can be better handled if people starts to think.

During my childhood I always thought thinking and dialogging with oneself to understand a problem is a common act, and everyone must be doing it, just as I tried writing in the prelude...but o boy, I was so wrong. I see everyone is living the life of an investment banker. Allow me to explain an average investment banker life:

He joins a fast paced lucrative job at a young age. It hasn’t thought much on what he wants and when to quit. And with each day he gets sucked into the job like a toad being heated on a pan. He clearly knows he has enough money to quit, yet he just cant. I have talked with the investors on this and they often point out how it is difficult and one has to maintain lifestyle…etc etc etc. I call that a bullshit. 

That’s a justification, not the right answer honey. So in the end he never pauses and thinks to understand himself.

Same syndrome is being seen with our generation.

One can argue what’s wrong with that?

Well, if you escape out then nothing is wrong. But if life gave you lemons, you hit a low point or suddenly are plunged into the abyss by your oneself, then that’s going to be a nasty deal. One can write about the experience like a drug addict going to rehab and writing a memoir which becomes a bestseller, but then what about the price? I personally, believe the price is never fair.

And then at the macro level, we should think beyond democracy, beyond populist opinions taking it to be the new law and confusing it to be the neo liberalism. In the near future we can’t survive without ditching democracy. The systems themselves will fade it out. And only the capable ones will take over the control. If you don’t like this idea, then try explaining this: If you don’t understand how Facebook works together with the cousin concepts and systems, how the hell you thought of drilling Mark Zuckerberg and come up with laws to restrain him. Don’t answer. Just think again. Because the new rules made by Brussels has ended up killing the small competitors ofthe Facebook, instead of penalizing it.