Becoming monstrosities

Both hate and love are within us — they are everyday expressions of our lives. We are already that.

But if we are also conscious and conscientious — reflective practitioners, we can change the relative proportions of things — we are active agents that can shape those things.

Habitually, unquestioningly, or intentionally we can become more or less of something.

The problem is that while we can change something individually, ‘we’ as a collective becoming is a different story.

The ‘becoming’ mechanisms and forces that are operative on the collective do not have access to collective learning and corrective mechanisms. Those have been systematically compromised, distorted and mauled by special interests.

Most of us believe that media is only what formal journalism is — media is also the benign-seeming entertainment, and consuming that we let into our lives, and it is that media, the one we leverage for our world-making that fosters more of the collective negative in service of your individual fancies.These are the processes and platforms of living that we are continually weakening, ceding our own judgments and agency to technologies and other forces. Most of us are disengaged from the political worlds — where the debates happen, or should happen.

We have handed over the process of self-reflection and choice as a society to a compromised institution, where media as a handmaiden of these larger interests, want us to serve something else.

You cannot blame any of these larger forces and shapers, for look at how our attention has been captured in the shallow forms of entertainment. Whether we hoot people at a match, or watch movies with wanton violence, we are buying into glib solutions that are cognitively inexpensive.

Every choice, every act of seemingly innocuous designs, is also an invitation to join regimes of hatred. That has become the leitmotif, the signature of our progress. There are more movies on concocted terrorism plots we lap — faux nationalism and patriotism appeals, and they know it.

We only call such things out when it hurts our material well-being, but never when we have exploited and exhausted platforms of mutual trust and care. So comes all the talk about sustainability and planetary resilience.

We become more of what is already within us — but the failures of the learning and design processes of the societies we belong to, have no appetite for identifying what that is, that is already within us — there is no platform for truth and reconciliation.

This is the inexorable contract we have signed up for, even the best of us. Appealing to the individual, while always desirable, might but in my opinion will not tip the balance.

We are becoming, all over the world, goaded too, to become monsters of monstrous proportions.

The NYT article that prompted this post.