https://kabirchugh.digitalpress.blog/have-a-cookie/
It’s important to have epiphanies. Whenever you’re observing life, dwelling on facts others have written up for you, sometimes a thought of your own strikes you as the ultimate truth on that context. The collectiveness of such epiphanies forms your own thinking, and evolves finally into an ideology.
May 8, 2015
It’s important to have epiphanies. Whenever you’re observing life, dwelling on facts others have written up for you, sometimes a thought of your own strikes you as the ultimate truth on that context. The collectiveness of such epiphanies forms your own thinking, and evolves finally into an ideology.
I encountered such an epiphany yesterday, witnessing the Salman Khan case even when I best tried to ignore it. It’s like such news is force fed to you by the media, so that you engage your time in thinking about such trivialities, drowning your brain in a noise of irrelevance, while the relevant is ignored right in front of your eyes.
But the case provided me with the epiphany, and I should move on to that. It resulted in me in thinking about aspects of human behaviour, which is the most despicably wonderful time pass of mine, for I don’t understand it, but only analyze it.
With the waves of sympathies riding on the actor’s behalf, on misconstrued arguments, made my fear of collective thinking only absolute. Collective thinking dilutes the essence of the complexity of individual thought, which though how much ambiguous in nature ultimately must conform to the majority’s views, which though aims at establishing the supremacy of an altruistic ideology, turns out expectantly and horridly a disaster for humanity.
The question I’ve addressed is primal. It’s a subset of disciplines relating to biology, psychology, sociology, economics and so forth, of which I’ll address these individually.
We memorized in first grade, ‘Man is a social animal.’ The term is an oxymoron. How can an animal tame its animal instincts, and settle down with a society? Well that happened for evolutionary reasons. We evolved from nomads and domesticated ourselves to prevent death from predators, starvation and loneliness, and provide an overall sense of security over thousands of years. But the essence is that the animal instincts are still present in us, today, masked under the veil of civilization.
The Biology then gives way to Psychology. According to Freud, there are two forms of consciousness inherent in man. The animal nature is inscribed by the ‘id’. The id is man’s consciousness which seeks satiation, and would do anything for the attainment of pleasure. That is the basic instinct of man, be it lust, hunger or violence. To prevent such dangers in a civilized setting; we created rules, morals and order, over time internalizing them. This acquired consciousness where humans define right from wrong (in complete subjectivity) is the ‘superego’. This basically differentiates us from animals, as a result of our exceptionally evolved brain. The confluence of these two forms of consciousness forms our actual ‘ego’, with the two in battle sub-consciously. This feeling of discomfort is what psychology terms as ‘cognitive dissonance.’
Here the digression ends, and now I can come straight to the point, with the help of my beloved, Economics. We’ve established by the aforementioned points that man needs society to function and has an individual morally ambiguous nature. Now suppose there are two people. Each would have their own beliefs, and can only function as a society if they conform to certain views, hiding their true thoughts which one might disagree with or even reject. This is classic game theory. The two agents only guess the expected strategy of each and hence act upon that, for maximum benefit. This leads to what we call the equilibrium, which here represents the mutual agreement on collective thought, diluting the overall set of individual beliefs.
This becomes complicated in the real world of multiple agents, where the dilution of thought would increase with agents, and the fear of being rejected on such grounds even more, concentrating and consolidating the accepted set of viewpoints. This is evident in religion, as well as nationalism.
Let me illustrate. The concept of nation states is new in man’s history. Throughout our childhood, we are socially programmed to show absolute devotion to nationalistic symbols like our flag and the National Anthem. This is not bad, until it gives way to jingoism. I recall playing with my friends in a park when there was a sound of our national anthem being played somewhere distant. Immediately everyone stood still. My friends and I didn’t, and we kept on playing. Suddenly we were bombarded with people labelling us to the extent of being ‘Anti-Indian’, just because we didn’t stand for about 20 seconds the anthem was playing. But let me ask this. Do you stand in attention for your own or just because everyone else is standing? The question is rhetoric, as you know the answer yourself.
Human nature is moulded from a central authority our culture has created for us. But there is a solution which is unfortunately double edged. In a large society, there are people who reveal their true nature to other agents they can trust. These people share their true beliefs and reinforce them, creating a distinct ideology. Hence liberal people stand behind the backs of other liberals. But this also means that the majority reinforces the belief of itself only stronger.
Interesting.