Absolute Chaos!
By the time you’re reading this, you could already be submerged in a sea of news notifications, a cluttered desk, fifty-eight Chrome tabs, your neighbour’s dog barking away to glory, dishes clanging in the kitchen, and a lost sense of the concept of time. Madness, no? It is a hurricane and you’re right at the centre of it.
This pandemic has ripped apart almost every crack on the planet. Along with the hundreds of thousands of human lives destroyed, so is complacency and stability. Actually, scratch complacency, because that was a joke, clearly. I was reading this article earlier, about how our social and economic systems are affected by this chaos. Each unit of humankind is being tested, and the hierarchies that were built to make the system work suddenly find themselves rudderless. The most powerful of all nations are brought down to their knees. Leaders of high rhetoric and cool captaincy have set up shop as nouveau riche comedians. Collectively, we do not know whether to laugh or run. Existing human generations fight for a moral superiority to helm this global ship. Ideologies, religion, wealth, racism and finally, the ultimate human flaw of war, are all boiling in a cauldron, stirred by the hands of the old world order. If this metaphor is too heavy for you, I understand. But remember, you are in this cauldron yourself. That is reason enough to be scared, for you aren’t fortunate enough to be stirring your own fate.
The world as it stands is a failing. A failing of humans and all that they fight for. We are all mere hopeful creatures looking to the sky for answers, as we have been for generations. And after this great shock has jolted us to a near halt, all we do nowadays is look to the future. We look for hope and semblance of a life that seems bygone.
But what if we look to the past?
What if we look to the enormous volume of human life spread out over the last few millennia?
Our ancestors weren’t just our past, but history also has a way of helping build the future. Our ancestors were storytellers first, and kings and peasants later. What we do not often see is that our past is quite simply a story, like any of the ones we read for escape. Yes, our history is real and tangible and ties us to our roots even today, but it is also just another story for us to read. It is the same as the one you read to a child before bed, or a rousing adventurous tale of swashbuckling pirates, or Harry Potter, or the Mahabharata, or a traveller’s guide to South America. Each of these stories, real or otherwise, imprint a certain narrative onto our minds. Amidst this chaos of a pandemic, our past is a beautiful reminder of the story of our struggle. We may have had different origins of Central Asia and Africa and South America, but what unites us is our shared story. From the wheel to fire to farming to wars to monarchy to the nation-states of today. We need not pray for a miracle to save us, we already have everything we need to predict our future. I’ll tell you what I mean by that.
Kingdoms have sprung and fallen, wars fought at the drop of a hat, millions killed in no time, and loyalties changed. Species are extinct, vast swathes of land and soil are radically changed, tribes and natives exterminated, and civilisations lost. Heroes are memorialised, revolutions are sparked, and life has stepped foot on the moon. The immensity of our past proves the futility of our efforts and our ambitions on a personal level. We remember few others from the era of Alexander The Great, and we will never know who amongst us will be the famed star of our time. It could be a crusader like Elon Musk or an obscure farmer in Nigeria whose secret literary works are discovered two thousand years later. We don’t know, and that’s the way it should be.
People who engineered their life for fame might have been successful, but their spotlight lasts barely a generation. Even in fame or glory or history, there are no figures which last the strength of time. Not because their feats were not legendary, but because the thousands of generations that follow them simply form their own milestones and gods.
Mighty sultans and queens who trampled over the poor and killed to expand their empires are nothing today but a blip in one particular dynasty in a fallen kingdom in a bygone millennium. It paints an ironic and bleak picture, doesn’t it? Reminds me of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. But that’s exactly where I draw my conclusion from.
The only constant learning from history is that nothing is absolute. This planet and all the beautiful life on it is bigger than the sum of our parts. Humans have always lost because they failed to understand that everything that they have tried to tame is bigger than they could possibly imagine and certainly bigger than their personal vanity and greed. Coming to the present pandemic, we are struggling to find an absolute in the world because the systems we thought to be robust are crumbling. One by one, we see all that we stood for being swept over by new changes, all relative to our pre-pandemic settings. For white-supremacists, a brave young generation protesting for a racism-free world is a jolt to their beliefs. For global economies that have used crude oil to power everything, climate activists represent their demise. For everyone thinking that the world is spiralling, it’s solely because of rapidly evolving social constructs that kick you out of your comfort zone. And like most people, this chaos is overwhelming for you on a daily basis. What if you step out of this time in history, and see the broader saga of humans? Somewhat like Tilda Swinton thumping good ol’ Benedict out of his body in Doctor Strange. You’ll feel a sense of calm and security that can only be derived from a genuine trust in your future. We’re so used to saying out loud that the future is not in our hands. Sure! We can’t make it dance to our tunes, or predict things like the Simpsons. But the life of your fifth great-grandmother will tell you that you will be FINE! By conscious efforts or not, our global civilisation will learn from the past as much as you did from your previous relationship.
(Not much? Or a whole lot? You decide :P)
Hope is a beautiful thing, and I cannot understand the ones who dismiss it as a ploy to keep people running on the wheel. Hope is fantastic, and it is the strongest force to have kept humans going. It is what drove the early settlers to America, in search of the new world. One of my favourite books is The Count Of Monte Cristo by Dumas. It is a moving story of how prison breaks a man’s character and his hope, only for him to rebuild his destiny and shape his own future, among other things. We had a pandemic and two world wars in the last century itself, and this pale blue dot still stands.
I shall float something interesting here. When we’re talking about the many issues humans face today all over the world, we think the only thing that could solve them is conscious action by activists and democracy and us people. We think we’re being the saviours to bring back the planet on track from the horrible directions our leaders are taking us in, and that somehow- we’re the normal and they are the anomalies to be eliminated. But what we can observe from the fifth great-grandmother is that it is not a conscious movement after all. It is just a course of history that is taking place due to circumstances and factors supporting it. That’s it. It is as random as a fictional story. We may be living in a time when humans are especially aware of their place on this earth, but that does not stop us from forgetting that we are merely another generation to live on this planet. I’ll round it up if it doesn’t make sense. The chaos that you see in the world today has been present all the time. Most likely, you’re just consuming more news. If you want to make sense of what’s going on, take yourself out of the picture. Watch the overview of the world and its journey since the birth of humans. You are ALRIGHT! This world has seen extremes on all fronts, and it still stands. You don’t need me to tell you what to focus on, there are far more beautiful things that we’re yet to see on this planet. Chaos is the way this human experiment works best, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.
You can blog about it though.
