Your Operating System
What’s your program?
The New Mindscape #A1–1.
You need to be deprogrammed.
From the moment you were born, you started to learn how to deal with people and how to do things. You learned what was expected of you and you learned how to carry out those expectations. You learned a lot of things so well that you can do them without thinking.
You were programmed.
You learned the programs for so many things. How to sit and eat properly at table. How to ride a bicycle. How to do maths. How to write. How to follow rules and conventions. How to be a good student. How to pass exams.
Most of these programs are integrated into a single Operating System: the way your mind and body have been formatted.
Different scholars have different words for this mental formatting: mindset, culture, cultural toolkit, mental models, integrative schemas, worldviews, patterns of thinking. In these essays, I’ll call it the Human Operating System (HOS) — to be brief, from now on I’ll just speak of the Operating System.[1]
Your Operating System is what enables you to process all the information that comes to you, to boil it down to manageable entities, to identify relations between them, to decide what’s important, to make decisions, and to act. It also mediates the coordination between your mind and your body, and how your body moves and acts. And it mediates the coordination between yourself, other people, and other things. Everything is mediated through your Operating System.
Society also operates according to an Operating System. The Operating System is distributed throughout the members of society, allowing them to communicate and to coordinate. Without a common Operating System, it would be impossible for people to communicate and to reach common actions.
You weren’t born with an Operating System. Through your education and training, in your family, in school and in society, the Operating System was implanted in you.
Without an Operating System, you’d be unable to live or survive as a human in society.
Now this is the problem:
Our Operating System is broken.
Look at the world around you.
Look at yourself.
You tell me.
Is the Operating System working?
A defective Operating System will highlight the wrong information, make the wrong relationships, and push you to the wrong course of action. It will activate some of your powers while your other powers are shut down.
The result:
You feel you’re being programmed, but there’s something missing in the program.
What is most precious about you has no place in the program.
Society is tearing itself apart.
We’re destroying the world.
The Operating System is crashing.
People are pressing reset, adding updates and patches.
But I say: All Operating Systems have a limited shelf life.
We need to design a new Operating System.
…
Most people are executing an Operating System without knowing it.
You can open up the Operating System and understand how it works.
Which parts are good for us and which parts hurt us.
And you can learn what it takes to build a new Operating System.
What is broken about our Operating System?
It divides us.
It divides your body, your mind and your spirit.
It makes you fight against yourself:
Your body against your mind.
Your mind against your body.
Your spirit against your mind.
Your spirit against your body.
Your mind against your body and your spirit.
One is overdeveloped, and the others weak and sickly.
If you’re an urban dweller with a university education, there’s a good chance that your intellect is well developed, and your body and spirit are atrophied.
The Operating System has divided you against yourself.
It divides us against our world.
It treats the world intellectually, as a resource to be extracted and monetized.
It neglects that we are bodies living in the world, and spirits who care about the world.
It litters the world with suffering bodies and suffering spirits. And turns the world itself into litter.
And it divides humanity against itself.
It formats us into producers and consumers.
It defines us by numbers.
It values us by our place in a ranking, or our distance from an average.
We don’t know who we are, so we define ourselves by who we are not.
We don’t know who we are, so we fear and hate those who we are not.
Society is broken, and we don’t know how to fix the pieces.
It’s our Operating System that’s broken.
Can we build an Operating System that strengthens and unifies our body, our mind and our spirit?
That enhances the communication and unity between us and our living planet?
That enhances understanding and unity among humans?
Where should we start?
I say:
Reach in, reach out, look around;
Reach up, reach down, look ahead.
Reach in: know and listen to your body and your spirit.
Reach out: know and listen to others.
Look around: know the reality you’re in — be wise.
Reach up: connect to the divine; strive for the highest ideals.
Reach down: keep your two feet on the ground — be practical.
Look ahead: march forward with a clear vision.
This is a critical task, and The New Mindscape series will get you working on it.
…
In the New Mindscape series:
1. You’ll learn what a Human Operating System is and how it programs your life and society.
2. You’ll learn about different Operating Systems and how to switch between them.
3. You’ll learn who you really are, what your true values are, and what you are capable of.
4. You’ll learn how to take control over building and aligning your Operating System to what really matters to you.
5. You’ll investigate how to design a new Operating System — one that will work better for you and for humanity.
Does this speak to you?
Do you want to follow the program or start writing a new one?
Spoiler!
Where will the New Mindscape journey take you? You can read the final essay of the series here.
For a more in-depth discussion of the concept of “human operating system”, see my essay “Human Operating Systems.”
For more on what’s wrong with our current operating system, see my essays “The Fatal Flaws in our Operating System.”
I said you need to be deprogrammed. Is that even possible, or advisable? See here for what I think.
The New Mindscape series is a practical exploration of spirituality rooted in the critical perspectives of anthropology and sociology.
Click here to read the next essay in the series (#A1–2): What is Spirituality?
Save this URL for the whole New Mindscape series, in the proper sequence:
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[1] Wang, Zhendong, Yimeng Wang, Kang Li, Juan Shi, and Fengyan Wang, 2021. “The Comparison Of the Wisdom View In Chinese And Western Cultures”, Curr Psychol(41), 11:8032–8043. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01226-w
This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
