“Education is key in the search for justice in the world. The untapped excellence of people living in poverty is being wasted in the need to survive.”
This quote from a participant in The Courtyard of a Hundred Trades has been on my mind a lot lately.
I have watched our political arena over the last few months with a kind of detached horror. I have been shocked at the amount of fake news, uneducated perspectives, wrong ideas, and just plain hatred that has been put out there…. By lots of people and groups on all sides of the aisle.
I keep looking around at the level of hatred and violence that has been completely normalized in our country over the past 3 election cycles. Our election season, beginning with mudslinging and fear-mongering commercials filling every media source and ending with the inauguration, has become a collective traumatic event for our country. Regardless of your political views, no one comes out of this unscathed.
My question is why?
What is happening now that allows us to other and hate one another with such callousness? I grew up hearing that we are living in the most peaceful time in recorded history. And while that remains true on a large scale, violence and war has been steadily increasing for the last 30 years. Something is happening, and we really need to figure out what quickly.
I think this quote is a starting point. There is a lack of education in our country and our world. Take a breath and read on before you start arguing with me in your head.
Our systems have not kept up with our technology, which means that very few of us have the resources or knowledge to know when we are being fed lies and being used by algorithms (hint, it’s WAY more than you think, whether you think it is a lot or a little). This was true before AI came into the picture, and it has exponentially escalated over the past year, with fake pictures, news articles, and videos that can be created by anyone with an internet connection and computer with the touch of a button flooding every website and news source available.
In addition, we don’t understand how our brains are wired towards confirmation bias, how the chemicals and hormones in our bodies affect our thinking (yes cis men, y’all too), and how our phones literally create echo chambers for us to get angry in (high emotions are much more likely to keep us engaged than contentment).
Spoiler alert: everything costs. So if you aren’t paying money for it (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc.), the currency is your attention, and the goal is to get you to spend as much of it as possible on the platform. It’s called PAYING attention for a reason… you are paying with it. You are much more likely to spend your time and attention when you are being told you are right and everyone else is wrong, than if you were being given truths and facts that make you uncomfortable and force you to think. The truth is not lucrative.
Our ego’s number one job is to keep us safe, and that is a really good thing. However, danger has changed, and our egos didn’t get the memo. In the relative safety of our homes, that are usually not populated by lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), our ego finds other threats (like opposing views, disagreements, or just plain discomfort) to keep us “safe” from.
There are SO. MANY. PROBLEMS. in our world today that I absolutely 100% believe are solvable by the world's greatest minds alive right now. But we have no idea who the world’s greatest minds even are. We talk about those in power, the Elon Musks and Bill Gates of the world, as the greatest minds, when in reality, they are simply the most privileged and richest minds. The biggest challenge that we need to overcome to solve the biggest problems of our world, is how to find and then support the truly greatest minds in our world so they can focus on the problems that need solving.
I would bet my life’s savings that the smartest, most intelligent, solves-problems-in-their-sleep individual alive right now is living in such extreme poverty that their talents are being used just to stay alive.
What would we be able to accomplish if everyone in our world could focus on the things they do best and love the most? How would life change for everyone if every individual had the resources to self-actualize?
Honestly, these questions break my heart, because I think that we would live in an incredible society. Just the act of making sure that everyone is cared for would make our world unrecognizable to us today.
I don’t really have any answers or solutions. But I do want to urge you to question yourself constantly:
Why do I believe that?
Why am I feeling the way I do?
Why do I think that way?
Why are they saying that?
Why are they so different from me?
Why am I so angry at those people?
And then, if you run out of whys, ask yourself some of these questions:
What am I missing in this situation?
Is this information true?
What is the source of this idea?
Who told me this?
Can I trust this belief I hold?
What value does this person in front of me have to the world?
How can I be a better person?
What am I paying attention to? (Remember, you are truly PAYING attention, because attention is a commodity in our current system.)
There is hope… but hope is a verb, not a noun. We are all going to have to take action to make our hope for a better future the reality, because the current trends are not heading in that direction without some serious intervention on our part. What do we truly want for our descendants? And how do we make that happen?
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