Blind by choice
Our eyes contain 127 million retinal cells at any given point of time, which help us identify about 10 million shades of colour. Moreover, the clarity of the image our eyesight captures touches 576 megapixels. Even the finest cameras, with their magnificent capture quality, borne from the hard labour of technology, can’t come close to this figure. Which underlines a sweet irony: we are blessed with only five senses and each one of them are marvelous on their own; imagine the world we’d experience had we got more than 5 of them!
Sticking to the topic here, beauty indeed lies in the eyes of the beholder. Irrespective of the biological properties we enjoy, we somehow fail to see what’s right in front of us. Think of words like betrayal, deception, gimmick, masquerade and placebo, and you’ll pluck a clue about how useless our blessed vision can be at times. Things unfold before our eyes and we fail to see through them. Our so-called well-wishers fool us without resorting to Prestige-level trickery and we let them. Why, so? We don’t know. We saw but we failed to see everything. Or, perhaps we chose to overlook some aspects. We’ll never know.
If you zoom out a bit, you’ll notice a similar pattern in how we conduct ourselves in this bittersweet wretched world of ours. So many factors working against us are allowed to flourish even though we’re fully aware of their consequences. If these consequences aren’t worrisome for us, they will be for those we purport to live for — our grandchildren. It’s not that we can’t see that the unperturbed use of plastic is catastrophic or that we are hurting the environment irreversibly by taking out our cars when there are more than enough cabs already on the road. Similarly, it’s not that we don’t know how much democracy suffers when the educated class shies away from its civic responsibilities or that paying taxes—the correct phrase should be ‘saving taxes’ given how reluctantly we go about it; besides, we aren’t doing anybody a favour by shelling out for the facilities we enjoy — doesn’t exonerate us from our other duties. We see this very clearly. We simply prefer to ignore lest our conscience doesn’t let us sleep at night. It’s an inherent defence mechanism built by excuses.
This blindness is axiomatic when you zoom out a bit further and notice it also in the manner we perceive history. According to anthropologists, about 100 billion of our kind — the current population is north of 7.5 billion — have traversed this planet and nearly half of them were victims of mosquitoes. In simpler terms, mosquitoes are the greatest mass murderers of all time. At least for us. Even today, they are out there executing their divine plans across all continents except Antarctica. It shouldn’t be a surprise if they managed to accompany us all the way to Mars. A mosquito can’t be contained within words like tenacious or triumphant. Yet, it barely features in our conversations about all the events that conspired against us before our species recorded a massive uptick in our numbers last century. Are we deliberately blind to their murderous intentions?
Speaking of which, Hitler has assumed pop culture status thanks to the mass murder he engineered. However, the established number of Jews (6 million) he is responsible for killing pales when you take in to account his peers from the 20th century. Stalin did much more worse (20+ million) against those who wouldn’t accept his mandate. Later, Mao was proudly responsible for perishing over 70 million Chinese via inhumane policies. Yet, in mass memory, Hitler is the name that pops whenever we wonder how the word ‘evil’ looks like. Is it because of the role literature and cinema played in augmenting his persona? Maybe. Not very long ago, Pope Francis was hailed by Harvard fellows for orchestrating a 180 degree spin on the failing image of The Church. By this yardstick, Hitler should be given more credit for his (inadvertent) marketing credo. Despite his low score on the chart, he’s the most celebrated face of vile. Or maybe, we are being blind here.
This was prehistory and history. The prevailing condition doesn’t change in the future either.
If you were to ask around what’s the single greatest threat facing us nowadays, hardly anybody would point out the exploding human population. They’ll blurt out everything from poverty to illiteracy to ignorance to climate change to AI but will somehow not see what’s so fucking obvious. It’s an unsustainable model. Yet, our greedy nature doesn’t let us be frugal in our wants. We want everything. As plain as that. Don’t ask us to curtail our luxuries. Don’t ask us to plant more trees. Don’t ask us to go easy on our carbon footprint. Don’t ask us to move towards a plant-based diet or give up on our meats. And at top of the list, don’t you dare ask us to control our seeds. That’s not happening. We’d rather destroy this planet with our so-called beloved progeny as witnesses than help the situation by being reasonable. Or maybe, we are being blind here too. As usual.
