On Changing the World

Thats it, ladies and gents. After exactly 17 years, 4 months and 28 days, i have done it.

I have figured out the solution to all the world's problems

*theme from jaws*


And the answer is: Sex!




No, actually, thats just wistful thinking.
The real answer involves an absolutely un-sexy mix of identity, unity and modification of behaviour considered normal for thousands of years.

Sex sounds so much better, doesnt it.


Anyway. Here starts the serious blog:

Have you opened a newspaper recently? Sure, the sports section is fine, with United winning the premier league AND the champions league (HA!), and the Euro on the verge of starting. But have you seen the world section? Just a glance will tell you that everything is messed up, that something went wrong somewhere, and now hundreds of thousands people are unhappy and dying. Somewhere or another, our parents made a mistake, because while we’re supposed to be advancing as a people, aiming to become the greatest civilisation this universe will ever see, the walls are crumbling and coming down around us.

I’m not gonna even bother listing down all the problems. Go open the paper.

What is going on? Why is everything so wrong? Racism, intolerance, violence, hatred… All these things cause such conflict that world-wide peace seems such a distant boat on the horizon, one in the middle of the Bermuda triangle, being blasted by cannons on one side, sinking into a whirlpool on the other, with Godzilla and the Kraken waiting for a bite, and heavy storm clouds above it, and…. Well, you get the idea.

It must be stopped. I’ve always believed that not having the ability to do something is fine, but having the potential and wasting it is an unforgivable crime. And who has more potential than the nine billion people inhabiting the planet at the moment. We’ve seen what people can do; look around you, everything you have is the result of the labour of a SMALL group of people. Imagine, just imagine what can be achieved if every person on the planet achieves his or her or its full potential. If no one was blown up in a suicide bomb attack, if no one starved, if everyone could afford to go to school, if everyone could get healthcare, if everyone had the freedom and opportunity to express themselves and all their ideas. Its breathtaking, truly beyond what words can encompass, this possibility. I can almost see it, and it is great, oh so great. But sadly, it is as impossible as it is great.

Makes me want to cry.

So I’ll repeat myself. All these problems in the world MUST be stopped, so that we can reach our potential, so we don’t commit the greatest crime of all and fail to fulfil this greatness lying latent in our people. But how?

I decided to do some logical thinking. Before we can stop these conflicts, we must know what lies at the heart of them. Why do all these bad things happen?

Simple. It’s identity.

Tommy Lee Jones said, in Men In Black: ‘A person is smart. But many persons, people, people are wild, unpredictable beasts.’ I cant remember the exact quote, but that was it, more or less.

He hit the nail whack-bam straight on the head.

A person by himself is fine. But when groups of people clump together, they start forming an ‘identity’, which involves everything from customs to beliefs to laws. Everything a person is is defined by his identity. And in return for this obedience to his ‘clan’, the person is rewarded with security, a sense of normalcy and belonging and purpose. This is what religion and race and nationality all involve. For the loyalty a person gives, he gets back a ‘family’, essentially.

Now this shouldn’t really be a problem. Identity isn’t a bad thingy, it helps a person live. So why is it causing trouble? People take their identities far too seriously. Clannish behaviour is essentially when these people, so obsessed with their own group, concentrate solely on the affairs and welfare of themselves, and their group. What other people think or want no longer matters; in fact, it is often seen as an imminent threat on them. Religion, nationality, race, perhaps even gender, all these classes work that way, they all fuel this clannish behaviour. One religion tries to impose its ideology on another, countries don’t care about any suffering going on outside their borders, people of one race are constantly trying to gain an advantage over people of another.

There. That is the reason the world is in such turmoil. Take any situation. Al-Qaeda? An example of a religious group, assured of its righteousness, trying to change everyone around them. The LTTE in Sri Lanka. Idiots, they only care about whether THEY get land and rights and power. Who cares who has to die for it? The mighty junta in Myanmar. While that cyclone decimated the people, they prevented foreign aid from giving swift help. Why? Because they were not part of the Junta clan! Who knows what those devious outsiders had planned. In Malaysia, all kinds of racial discrimination goes on, so people of one race can be assured success. Why? Because that’s the way things are. You stand for your own kind.

It’s a selfishness that gauls me. People are so self-absorbed it’s amazing. How can you care so little about another person, simply because he’s not ‘one of you?’

So it’s this selfish clan behaviour that so undermines any sort of effort towards global unity. And while it’s definitely not the only cause, it is a major factor in the complex equation that always gives destruction as the answer.

Why does this clannish behaviour come about? Let us scale it down for a while. Take a nice big school, with lots of different children. The different cliques are almost immediately visible. The group of ‘cool’ kids who always sit at their own table at lunch, hardly ever talking to anyone outside their group. The big bullies, who patrol the play ground, picking on anyone who isn’t the same size. The Goths, withdrawn and dark, keeping to themselves and glaring at anyone happier than them (which is just about everyone). Like the macrophages in our bodies, they quickly swarm and engulf any intruder identified as ‘non-self’. But why the hostility?

What do all these kids have in common? If you kidnap a kid from each clique, it will be painfully obvious: The cool kid probably sticks to his group to remind himself that he’s worth something. The bully is probably just a big scared baby, taking out his wrath on smaller kids so no one will mess with him. And the goth is probably just in it for the identity, so people will see him and think ‘oh, he’s a goth kid!’.

They’re all insecure. Insecure about themselves, about their self worth, about what other people think about them.

Now let’s scale it right back up. Why would all the great clans of the world be insecure?

They’re all afraid of losing out to some other group. That’s the key part. Every single group in the world, at one point or another, is afraid that some rival bunch somewhere will take something that they could have had. Perhaps even something they needed to have. And so they move to prevent it, move to defend the ‘I’s and the ‘Me’s of the group, move to keep all they can within the clan, and sabotage others from prospering at their expense. Because if a group loses out, it might render them obsolete or extinct, and remember, these groups form the identity of all the people inside them. No one wants to be obsolete, so you can be sure that people will fight for their identities, and thus their groups, till the very end.

Why are these groups so afraid of others getting ahead? It’s basic instinct. Survival of the fittest. The man that has fire lives, the man without it dies. People in one clan NEED to have more than people in the other, its simple instinct: get out ahead of those around you, you’ll survive; fall behind, you die. Fear drives it, creates an in-born need to compete, and win. From this need to be better come all the other fallacies plaguing the world today: Greed, anger, retaliation, jealousy, all those demons come from the simple insecurity of a group of people, their fear that they’ll face obliteration if they allow others to flourish without keeping pace.

It’s all Darwin’s fault.

Now here’s the ultimately depressing bit. This survival of the fittest instinct is purely human nature. That’s the way we are. When someone has a bigger house, we get jealous. When someone takes credit for something we did, we get angry. When someone seems to want to hurt you, you retaliate. It’s all instinctual. It’s what kept us alive back in old times, and we can’t fight it.

Or can we? Take racism for example. It’s been proven that even young children are more likely to trust someone with the same colour skin as them. This is because our race is our clan, and it is supposed to be full of people similar to us, and people whom we can trust (supposedly). And everyone else is the enemy, they are different, and they must not be allowed to do better than our race. I won’t lie, even I get racist feelings and thoughts, and I am very much ashamed of them. I see something happen, my first instinct is often ‘ah, it’s because he’s so and so, all of them are like that’. I think all of us get thoughts that follow along those lines. It’s not whether we get these feelings that matter; it’s what you do with them. Do you act racist? I know I don’t. I make a conscious effort to quash any sort of racist feeling that may develop, and I examine and re-examine myself thoroughly to keep any sort of un-fair bias out.

There. It IS possible to control your natural instincts. And that’s not the only example. You don’t go around sleeping with everyone you see, do you? (A pity, I wouldn’t have minded that too much.) And you don’t excrete all over the place, even if you need to. You find a bathroom! These are all examples where human nature says one thing, but we’ve controlled ourselves and reigned in our urges. And for what? At the risk of sounding terribly cheesy, I’ll say it: It’s for the greater good.

So perhaps there is an ever so thin sliver of hope left, a rescue plane taking off from the other side of the world to try and save the screaming crew of that doomed ship. When you feel these urges, these clannish instincts, suppress them. Forget about them. Fight human nature.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it might save all of us.

I don’t dare to hope.

It is up to us. The new generation. This is our world now, not mine or yours or his. OURS. We need one another, though you might not be able to see it. We CAN build a world where no one needs to be insecure, where no one has to fear being left behind or losing out, where the greater good for everyone takes precedence over an individual’s instinct to be better. But only a universal effort will succeed. EVERYONE must chose to care more about their neighbour than themselves, everyone must be called to go beyond thinking about individuals and clans, and start realising that we’re all in this together in the end, every single one of us, and we all deserve a share.

I can see it now. It’s a vision beyond splendour and magnificence. The wonders we can accomplish, if someone would just rally the world, and if the world would just follow. We can’t keep going down the path we’re on; none of us will survive. But if we can change, transcend the humans we are, and then maybe we just might be able to achieve things that even the most visionary among us can’t even begin to fathom.

Change the world.

We have to.

Will you?