Somewhere in the history of a nation, a group of people, a religion is a time of profound and well spread activity philosophically. It's like they all limited all of their core beleifs to some critical period of time and then they decided not to think about those things anymore. People do that too, they make an image of themselves modelled upon some specific times and try not to vary too much from that, unless of course the vagaries of life holds up an unrecognisable image in the mirror.
Further than what our thoughts can convey, the roots of our thinking are submerged in the soil made up of dead ancestors. It's not easy to forgive someone for being limited to their own perspective, because everyone else too is limited to their own, but reasoning out things helps us recognise why we think like we do and that is required for moving forward.
For me, there was my fear of giving up on my lousy job. As long as I kept on telling myself that I could both achieve my dream on the sidelines and do the job as well and that thinking otherwise is cowardice and shirking, I wasn't able to resign. It was only when I recognised that my actual fear was in fact rooted in an utter lack of self belief that I was able to move forward, take appropriate remedies and get the control of my life back.
Somehow, there lies in our subconscious the same kind of reasonings that keep on pivoting us back to the same peg and we are conditioned not to question those basic assumptions. Religion gets a hold on us in that way. I feel that we are afraid of the great unknown that life really is. Maybe there is no meaning to it all and we were all a freakish coincidence in the otherwise deadness of life. Then we evolved according to the conditions we faced and bam, our story is explained. But hey! That to me doesn't sound too inspiring and the storyline sucks too.
George Borges had warned his fiction class about relying too much on reality. He said that if the story gets too real, we start finding it boring. After all we have certain expectations from the story and expect it to play accordingly. A nicer story would involve us in the lead roles doing some culturally appropriate things to bring our own selves into existence, Jesuslike.
That story is so infused in every step of our lives that we take that we can't help overlooking it. The story of capitalistic growth has at it's roots a story of struggle of the poor guy, say Jack who through struggle and his wits manages to make himself rich and then finds way to keep it that way forever. Communisms story is that of collective struggle against Jack and taking his property and dividing it up. Socialisms story is setting a ceiling for Jack in terms of richness in the first place. Religions story is keeping everyone happy despite the poverty and pain.
Stories don't have to be literal, they just need to have that felt value which gives them the authority to run our lives in a very subtle way. A man on the side of revolutionaries fighting the just war and the man on the side of the enlightened conquistadors trying to bring light to darkness would have very different ideas about the same situation and the same happenings.
What is the story of today's world? We are tired of the capitalist's story, for it has left us raw and bruised. We gave up on the communist story because after the rush of the first page, it was rotten all the way to the end. The only option is to go back to the tried and tested story of the religious opium addict and many people have done exactly that.
From Putin to Erdogan to Trump to Modi to all those dictators rising up in the world right now, all of them without exception have used the nostalgic story of giving the people back the simple times of yesteryears as a ruse for getting elected. They've promised and promised and promised all of this on the basis of not some concrete plan that they have in their hands, but rather the clever move of building the story of revival that starts through the personal self of these power men.
Like a hero in a story without a villain, these men would feel useless and so they have even created the ruse of the coming evil and asked their followers to remain prepared. That is their story and we have believed them, considering their electoral victories.
What the world needs is therefore some new stories.
A story where we don't need dichotomies, where there is a lot of dialogue and a lot less action, a proliferation of unique characters doing what they like and others accepting the change. Underlying the entire story would be the basic human emotions of love, compassion and understanding, which would be aim of the story and not some megalomaniac or some extremist philosophy.
I just hope that such a story doesn't become too boring for our popcorn nibbling selves.
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