Why should I care about what is going on in Kim Kardashian’s life when people are dying in the Congo, living lives of slave labor for my privilege to write on this laptop?
How about talking about homelessness? I like to talk about things people don’t like to talk about. Sure, we have the right in the U.S. to talk about anything, but social culture has coaxed us into saying and talking only about things that maintain the status quo. This status quo, on a global scale, is a state of ideological war.
The culmination of U.S. history has led to the disheartening reality of a desensitized, individualistic society that trades autonomy for security, justice for comfort, collaboration for competition, controlled by an institution perpetrating and functioning off of the very immorality it protects us from, all while keeping us too busy to care. This is the cost of comfort under capitalism. I would be damned to call that freedom.
The greatest failure of humankind is its inability to get over itself. By over itself, I mean overcoming our human nature to fail. It is human nature to divide and conquer, to be jealous, zealous, overly competitive and underly collaborative. Our human nature is to lean on fear, not love, and somehow we’ve forgotten that it is always in one’s best interest to help another.
In the endeavor of creating a world that is not torn by ideological war, civility is the only way to create lasting change. However, this civility must be balanced with unchecked curiosity, which civility tends to deny. This can only be achieved through unconditional respect in attempts to create shared understandings.
Shared understandings are created through the discourse of humankind in a further effort to understand itself. We have been taught through culture, religion, education, politics and even our own families that capitalism is the best social structure. How naive are we to have convinced ourselves that the best structure requires the exploitation of individuals for the privilege of others?
I do not understand why we accept capitalism as the norm of society. Capitalism tells us that in order to succeed, someone else must fail, which is never necessarily the case. To break free from these ideological chains takes courage and internal reflection. Capitalism is not the best form of social structure; neither is communism or socialism, as we have seen their faults.
Modern capitalism is beginning to reveal its shortcomings. We are like an engine — an economic engine — that is rusting and getting old. Replacing the parts and finding scapegoats to blame wars and conflicts on is no longer working. The public is getting tired of the oligarchical structures that monopolize wealth and maintain a status quo of eat, work, sleep, repeat and die.
We are all made up of cells. My cells have eczema. Eczema is an autoimmune disorder in which the body feels that there are harmful cells within itself. It needs to get rid of those cells, therefore it attacks them so that they don’t exist anymore. Think of humankind as a body; we are the cells. That body is sick. It is diseased with more than just eczema. It is ridden with disorders, mental and physical, some that you and I are not even able to fully understand.
Maybe the disorder that plagues us is simply autoimmune. It is capitalism, it is socialism and it is any and every societal structure humans created that creates further war within itself. Humankind — the body that we collectively create, the social organism — is at ideological war with itself.
At the core of it all is fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear that challenging the dominant culture would end all cultures. Fear stems from our dependence on the system because the system provides just enough to remain comfortable with injustice.
While we have the freedom to say anything, our brains have already been groomed to justify civilized barbarism when anyone dares to challenge the state of the world we live in. We justify crusades in the name of religious virtuosity. We justify the Trail of Tears through “manifest destiny.” We justify the violence perpetrated by people in power under the guise of progress.
Challenging culture is challenging oneself. To go against what you’ve been taught to do and say your whole life is difficult. However, people have the innate ability to change not just physically, but mentally, spiritually and within the soul. People can change human nature.
That is what sets us apart. Our freedom to express new ideas and new ways of thinking, believing and acting is what has brought humanity to the place it is today. Although we still have a long way to go in breaking the chains of ideological subjugation and social structures that require oppression to function, this is something that we will accomplish through love.
I don’t think that intellectual discovery should ever breach civility and mutual respect. We have already lost enough respect for each other to no longer know what intellectual discovery looks like with mutual respect. It is a fine balance that can only be tuned through the harmony of people.
It is possible for two things that are contradictory to both be true, as the truths are determined by the human experience of life. It is important, however, that we redefine “civility” and “mutual respect” so that they are based in non-violence and shared understanding, rather than ideological capitalism.
The biggest barrier to this deeper understanding of humankind is ourselves. We must grow as a species in order to better understand what our true nature is. I don’t think that humans are innately jealous, hateful or malicious. These things are the result of years of conditioning and a dominant culture that manifests these things into our daily lives.
Only by changing ourselves will we change culture, and through changing culture, we can learn to love ourselves more. It is an iterative process that cannot be done alone. Only through unity and dialogue that pushes for a shared understanding of what we all want in life will we move past this era of ideological war.
