The recent attack in Sydney is another reminder of just how society is falling ever-deeper into a chasm of darkness. These events have been happening all over the world for some time now, but they are spreading and becoming far more common. There are many reasons for it, but ultimately, I believe it comes down to the degradation of individuals themselves. The average person is devolving, becoming more extreme in opinion and less in control of emotion, whilst also being driven by the need for attention by feeling part of something to fill the void in their lives.
More and more, we resemble our darkest sides.
Laws don't keep people in check.
What keeps the majority of people in check, are the norms of the community and social desire to be part of the group. Now that social dysfunction driven by community breakdown is so prevalent, there is less holding people in place. Not only that, due to the way we have conditioned ourselves on polarised content that has not only made us more extremist in view, we have also bought into a more individualistic approach, where satisfying our desires is the priority. And coupled with an incentivised victimhood culture where we have been encouraged to all be victims of something, someone, or some group - we feel justified to retaliate, no matter how unjustified it would have been earlier.
It is easy to blame religion or culture, but I think that what it all comes down to is that we have made our "identity" the most important thing. And no matter what labels that happens to include, each of them comes with adversarial positions, meaning that we have opposing identities. And the more we fight for our own, the more the opposition will fight for theirs, until it becomes attack. Fighting over religion, or borders, or language, or skin colour, or background, or whatever - always comes to violence, because people have been told to be proud of "who they are" even if they are proud over something they had no choice in, not had any hand in developing.
"I'm a proud Christian."
Really? Because according to the bible, Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall". Pride is strongly condemned in the bible and is the first of the deadly sins. Proud white/black person? So you chose your colour? You chose your parents? Are you a fool? Proud of your nationality? What? Did you choose where you were born?
When pride is wounded, it leads to revenge. Because when we put our identity, our ego, as the representation of ourselves, it is able to be hurt without ever coming into any personal risk. An attack on the Jews, the Muslims, the whites, the blacks, the gays, the women, the men.... every attack becomes an attack on everyone who identifies themselves as part of that group. And that means, the attacks are endless. And then, once we get our ego hurt, especially when we are as emotionally instable and personally insecure as we are today, we react, we want revenge. We don't want balance, we don't want equality - we want others to suffer like we have. We want to create more victims.
And the thing is, that while you can disagree because you would never do that, it is irrelevant for you as an individual. Because within your many identity groups lay a spectrum of people, and if there was a normal distribution of something like "Probability of violence", some percentage of them are at the extremes of low likelihood, and high likelihood. And as we consume more polarised media that generates outrage for clicks, the distribution skews, pushing more people into the higher probability range. And once some of them act upon their extremist views, it skews the distributions again, and again
It is a collective race to the fucking bottom.
Rather than disconnecting from each other, which has been the major shift in culture over the last few decades, what we should be doing is detaching from our identities. Especially the ones that we had zero control over. We need to kill the pride we have in arbitrary traits and instead built self-worth on who we are in terms of our behaviours, and the value we bring to our world, our family, our community, and humanity as a whole.
Calculate the value people bring to humanity today, and most people won't have much to be proud of. Instead, most of us should be fucking ashamed of ourselves.
But we don't have to be, because when we subscribe ourselves to an identity group, we can feel special just for being in the group. We don't need to do anything, because in the group there will be some people who do something decent, so we can claim personal glory by association from them, and when the other people in the group do something shitty, we can say, "I am not like that. I'm like the good one."
Identity as we use it today is a fucking sickness, no different to the worst of any religion that has ever been. It is a driving force for violence, because it is always divisive, always looking to create boundaries, and most of those boundaries don't even exist in reality. They are fantasies of the mind, dreamed up and protected by an ego that is looking to preserve its imaginary self, even as it strangles the host it lives within.
I can almost guarantee that the majority of people reading this might understand it at some kind of surface level, but will never take the journey to understand it at the core. Most will never pull apart and examine what identity is, because their own fantasy, their own ego will stop them, because understanding means losing the self that a person has come to believe is who they are. People feel that if they lose their known identity, they become lost. But the reality is,
It is the only way to find who we are.
If we are our actions, and all we are doing is repeating some tradition that we have been taught to do, with beliefs drummed into us, and feelings that react to anything that threatens what we have accepted as truth without exploration, what are we? But if we shed all of that shit, release the labels and programming, we can start to live the examined life, the one worth living. And if everyone did that, there would be no need for identity violence, because all of the egos will have disappeared, all the insecurities washed away.
There would be no need for revenge, for there would be no attack.
But we won't.
We are unlikely to ever be an enlightened species, because we are too attached to what we know, and believe what we know is correct. Even when we find out incrementally that what we know was wrong, our ego protects itself by making excuses as to why it didn't know better, and why past actions were justified. At what point does the ego forgive?
It doesn't. It carries damage forever, and wears it with pride.
I should know better than to be disappointed in humanity, especially since it is consistently meeting my expectations. I know we have better in us and potential to do great things, beautiful things. But we are unlikely to. Because the mean of the distribution curve we rest on is skewed toward personal satisfaction, instead of collective growth.
Are you proud of us?
I am not.
Taraz
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