What we are to do about "the world today."
I don't attend protests, engage in social media rants, or, in recent years, spend much time constructing logical arguments against those whose momentum strongly opposes mine.
Maybe this will change. But through my current lens I notice that what often results from passionate opposition, especially (but not exclusively) if it's of the disrespectful variety, is an acceleration of momentum on both sides, whether a winner is ever declared or not. When two speeding cars—no matter from what noble persuasion—hurtle toward each other, each with a wish to battle back the other (the “evil”, the “wrong-thinking”, the “-ism”), the likelihood one of the drivers hears the other's "logical argument" over the din and clatter of engines, let alone invites it in to stew in the still inner sanctum where minds actually change, is slim.
Still, I'm an idealist. I want good things for the world. I know what sadness, frustration, and disconnection feel like in my body, and I also know the sublimity of peace, humility, learning, opportunity, and cooperation. I want to bring about more of the sublime, in the widest-reaching way my single life can muster.
But the situations I consider problems exist for a reason. There are people who are heavily invested in things continuing as is, for reasons that make perfect sense to them. Their job, as they see it, is to protect the established pattern.
When I was little and exposed to cartoons, I thought there existed objectively evil people who in fact believe they are evil, and who awake each day to rub their hands together and scrunch their snivelly noses, perhaps at an unflattering photo of me nailed up with a dart above their bathroom sink. But those are just cartoons, and believing in such caricatures is no good for progress. It leads us to believe there is an objective truth, with some on the side of good and some on the wrong side. If we buy into this sort of objectivity, we spin off into all kinds of “love wins”/”good will prevail”/righteousness stories. We excel at being judgmental, but we don’t know how to lay the groundwork for actual change.
“Good” and “bad” are subjective labels. They’re in the eye of the beholder, and regardless of what my midwestern mother seems to think, there’s no actual boss of the world, so no beholder actually gets more weight or value than another, except as doled out in my imagination, your imagination.
If we remove good/bad judgment, we come to normalize the reality that not everyone concludes the same thing when they put their attention on an issue. We come to expect this—not because some people are evil or dumb, but because we all have varying life experience that have led us to value things differently.
If I only have one 8 billionth of a say in world affairs, then, do I have a right to use my voice? Absolutely. But if I do this with respect for others’ frames of reference, I’m much more likely to be sowing and fertilizing seeds of change as I walk my path. I’m less likely to pollute the soil with corrosive agenda like defeating, winning, overpowering (do we really want to see positive change in the world, or are we more attached to winning the argument?).
At the end of the day, our preferences for existence are probably more similar than social media would have us believe, but not everyone believes it’s possible have what we want. Human hearts naturally prefer green trees over cement, health over sickness, thriving humans over desperate ones… but some people have come to believe in a certain scarcity, and are naturally apt to be afraid there won’t be enough good stuff to go around. Change cannot be asked of those who are not yet able to believe in the vision and whose job, therefore, is to protect the old. For positive change to occur for all, those in the fortunate position of believing in abundance must tune into their creativity, and build the change.
Something I love: the eloquent evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris explains in an elegant 90 seconds how the current "world crisis" is a natural stage of our human development, and what we are to do about it.
