“India shaken by rape, murder of veterinarian, 26, on her way home.”
“With Brutal Crackdown, Iran Is Convulsed by Worst Unrest in …”
“Toxin-laced bubbles cover beach in India’s latest pollution scare”
“China due to introduce face scans for mobile users”
“A spike in food prices may not cause a recession, but it could …”
If the last few lines made you heady or made you want to leave the planet altogether, I can hardly blame you. At the time of writing of this article, these happen to be the search results for “recent news India” and “recent news world” on Google pasted word for word here. And if the Orwellian dystopia describing the death of privacy and freedom in all its myriad forms doesn’t seem more imminent than ever, I don’t know what to tell you. But no, this article is not a rant. Neither is this a purely informative article nor is it just another something to distract you from the leaky taps called the environment and the government. This article is to remind you what the human race is capable of if it bands together.
Yes, we are in one of the worst times in human history in terms of both population and pollution. Kashmir and Assam both saw massive constitutional breaches in the form of internet shutdowns and police brutality. Hong Kong saw the controversial extradition bill and the inhumane persecution of Uighur Muslims. The USA saw school and Walmart shootings, an incompetent president, and a backing out of the Paris agreement. Australia saw bushfires so bad that it rendered koalas functionally extinct and all this was while the Prime Minister was away holidaying. Hundreds and thousands died in the Syrian civil war. And privacy hit an all-time low with Facebook barely facing any charges for the Cambridge Analytica scandal and in fact went on to own WhatsApp and Instagram. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer causing the wealth gap to only further increase. Suicide and depression became so common, we began to use it in memes. Journalists, the people we task with finding out the truth, were murdered, with the Khashoggi killing in Saudi Arabia and of Daphne Galizia in Malta. Millions more were deported in different parts of the world as hate began to become normalized. Far-right supporters saw their interests, some of which might as well be unspeakable, represented as Trump in America, Boris Johnson in the UK, Duterte in the Philippines, and Narendra Modi in India. Fuming yet? But before you post a nice little angry rant on Twitter, let’s see why the world is in such dire condition. Short answer? It isn’t.
We tend to think it’s all bad because that’s all we see. This is something called survivorship bias.
In World War Two, the allied forces wanted to add protective armor to their warplanes. Because resources were strained, they couldn’t add armor to the whole plane. So, experts had to decide which areas were most vulnerable to attack and would benefit most from additional protection.
To decide where to allocate the armor, they studied planes that had been shot but successfully made it back home. They found these planes had incurred no bullet holes to the engine or cockpit, so the obvious train of thought led them to place armor everywhere on the planes except for the cockpit and engine.
Luckily, mathematician Abraham Wald pointed out the flaw in their plan: they were only analyzing the planes that had made it home safely. The location of the bullet holes was not fatal to the planes and, therefore, the aircraft hadn’t been brought down. He recommended the military attach the armor to the areas where the surviving aircraft had no bullet holes instead.
But it isn’t just survivorship bias at play here. Negativity bias, a term used to describe our tendency to focus on the bad much more than the good, plays a much more important role here. Arising out of our need to get tasks completed and subsequently processed by our monkey brains, it projects itself in various forms — from dwelling over insults to overthinking arguments. Positive reinforcement might work better, but in the end, your fear of getting fired from a company will motivate you to get that project done a lot faster than maybe waiting for a distant unsure promotion. This positive-negative asymmetry in our brain arises because as humans, we learned better from negative outcomes than positive ones, and over time, evolution took the reins on the matter. The reason media channels screen negative news far more than the positive is because negative news is often perceived to be more truthful. Since negative information draws greater attention, it is seen as having greater validity. But I think I’ve delved enough into the science of why your life seems so dull.
But, you must admit, you have wondered at least once why you should care about what is happening a world away. Besides humanitarian grounds, there really might not seem enough reason to care about the deaths of civilians in the Syrian war or protestors being attacked left, right, and center everywhere. But you should care for the same reason America went to war in Vietnam. Because what seems so distant today, might become your reality come tomorrow. America feared the spread of communism and its eventual arrival in the US and went to war on foreign soil. Sure there may have been other vested interests, but this one reason should be enough to convince you. Remember when we saw Hong Kong protests on our televisions and were horrified but part of us was calm because we were sure it would never happen to us. And yet protests against CAA rage across the country as you read this article.
Allow me to now show you the other side of the coin.
“Major Thai stores to stop giving out plastic bags by 2020”
“Once Numbering Less Than 400, Majestic Bukhara Deer Return To The Wilds Of Kazakhstan”
“As Australia Bushfires Rage, People Knit Mittens for Burnt Koalas and Raise Nearly $2 Million in Aid”
The above also happens to be the most recent news — all taken from various sources and pasted word for word. But you won’t find it among the top 10 searches for news, you won’t see it in your tabloids or hear it from your regular news channel? Why? Because sensationalism. Because viewers tend to stay on the same channel when they are shell shocked and unable to move from the front of their tellies. Because a rising TRP means more money for some rich plutocrat in some corner of the globe.
Like I said before, you might think we are at one of the worst times in human history in terms of both population and pollution. One could argue however that we do have the best healthcare ever. There weren’t multi-specialist hospitals at every other corner during the plague or The Black Death as it’s sometimes called. But before we dive into intricacies let’s examine the two leaks I mentioned above beginning with the government.
Look at the map above. More than 57% of the total number of countries in the world are democratic. Democracy might not be the fastest or best way to get things done, but it remains one of the only ways in which the governed can have a say in who the masters will be. And the Trump impeachment procedures(albeit late and not motivated by the right reasons, but nevertheless happening) stand testimony to its power. Every time this happens, I can nearly hear Lincoln saying the lines from his famous Gettysburg address, that would go on to embody the core principles of democracy :
“…that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”
And when a silent extradition bill was about to be passed without consent, it could have easily been followed by years of repression. But it didn’t. Thousands of human rights groups and scores of activists took to the streets to ban it. 800 arrests, 10,000 rounds of tear gas; at least 17 protest applications rejected by authorities, 1,000 retired police officers pressed back into service later we still haven’t given up. 25 percent of Hong Kong people have participated in a recent protest. Raw facts go on to prove that the human race is a resilient one. This is where you argue about the lives lost in the process and how in the ideal world this would have never happened. But considering how it could have been easily been worse, it is a safe bet that it isn’t all that bad. A worse case would have been the continued subduing of voices without due process. A journalist was murdered in Malta for investigating corruption in the government. Protests followed and the prime minister has agreed to resign. As long as the people still have power, and as long as they can leverage it against the forces who wish to trample them, we will always be on the winning half of the court.
For every bullet fired in the direction of women, a young girl from Pakistan is inspiring countless more to pick up pens and go to war with knowledge. For every person choosing to give in to the gluttonous side of capitalism, countless others make a resolution to lose weight or maybe spend less.
Even the Syrian Civil war finally saw an end on October 22nd of this year. At least on paper. And we have the rivalry for dominance between the Russians and the US to thank for this. “How?” you ask? Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled a 10-point shared agenda shaping the end of Syria’s civil war where Russia and Turkey agreed to uphold the “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Syria. The formerly US-backed Kurdish fighters were required to withdraw from the towns of Manbij and Tal Rifaat. But I promised to not make a rant out of this, so I’ll stop with that here.
Yes, I know. The last article about the impending Nuclear Holocaust did nothing to boost your morale and we might slowly be becoming the written version of Kurzgesagt but dissent without rebellion would be a complete failure and all recent events point in the other direction.
Now that we have taken care of that leak, let’s turn our gaze to something that might decide our fate in less than a decade — the environment. For every industrialist choosing to mine coal, a million more trees are being planted somewhere. As the smoke plumes from the Amazon blazes blotted out the sun in São Paulo a 16-year-old girl from Sweden rode a solar-powered catamaran to attend UN talks about climate change. While the US-backed out of the Paris agreement, Brussels was planning to ban all forms of fossil fuel transportation halfway across the world. IKEA decided to invest 220 million dollars into becoming climate positive and the hugely famous band Coldplay paused their tour until they could ensure they had a minimum carbon footprint at their concerts.
But the above is all talk. You’re a numbers-man you say? Not a problem. Let me lay down the stats for you.
- Number of nuclear warheads in the world: 13,890
- Number of protesters who took to the streets of Hong Kong: 2,10,000
- Life expectancy in 1800: 40 years
- Life expectancy in 2016: 80 years
- Literacy rate in 1970: 18 percent
- Literacy rate in 2016: 46 percent
- Proportion of the world living in abject poverty in the 1900s: 40 percent
- Proportion of the world living in abject poverty today: 14 percent
The world ain’t all that bad. As you read this article, plans are being made somewhere to fix this planet, plans are being made to shift to another planet should the need arise, plans are being made to close the wealth gap and the gender pay gap, plans are being made. Yes they are mere plans, but surely one person will take a stand, it might just be you, and like dominoes, we will all fall towards a better future. We’ve been fed so much of the dark stuff, so much of the looming clouds, that we no longer dream of the utopia this place can be, and we just might have overlooked the silver lining. Here’s to a better, and perhaps, a more hopeful 2020.
Some feel-good sources to make you feel less existential as you enter the new year:
https://www.today.com/news/good-news
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
