Sure, we’ve been hurt.
Sure, it’s been quite a few times now.
Sure, there’s a history to it and it isn’t pretty.
Understandable, that we want to understand.
The why. The who. The how.
We want to know the mechanism of evil.
It’s a lengthy task.
Natural, that we might not always have the resolve to keep sentiments at bay.
Natural, that we’re only human; and hurt would warp our thoughts.
Question is, how much we use that as an excuse?
How true we are to the path of finding truth?
How free we are from biases?
How free we are from hate?
How free we are from prejudices?
Have we developed stencils of stereotypes?
Do we view individuals of a specific community, religion, race, caste, ethnicity, nationality, gender, financial class, through the stencil of that stereotype?
Do we measure all of them as per the dictations of that stencil?
Do we over-generalize nature of our tormentors’ to their entire community?
Is it helping us?
Or does it blind us?
If it blinds us, question is:
Who wants us blind? Why?
Who wants us to act blindly?
Who wants to pour oil in the fire of sentiments?
Who wants a war to be there?
Who sees conflicts in religions and sects and races and genders as business opportunities?
Who has seen the potential of profit in that friction among people?
Who has engineered mechanisms to control minds; turn individuals to mobs; degrade thought and generate sensationalism; make crowds gather and explode into violence? Riots? Civil wars? Invasions? Atrocities? Rape? Genocide? Ethnic cleansing?
Who knows that selling weapons to both warring parties elevates business?
Who knows how to use social media to fuel hate?
Who knows how to pit isms against isms; manipulate ideologies; present religious texts in such ways that they’re guaranteed to get misinterpreted?
Who knows how to keep intelligent and sensitive minds busy in degenerate thinking?
Who knows that negative posts keep people occupied?
Who knows that negativity attracts attention and makes people concentrate only on it?
Who knows how to use Neuro-linguistic Programming and bombard minds with negative visuals and audios?
Who knows how to make a large number of individuals believe that their survival is under threat and anarchy is here and an all-out war is imminent?
Of course someone knows.
We don’t know who. Could be anyone.
Large corporate organizations. Royal bloodlines ruling secretly since millennia. Futurists who use super-computational power at their disposal to shape the world in a fashion profitable to them. Anyone.
But we have a choice.
A choice to understand and accept that these are the key-holders of evil.
A choice to beat them at their own game.
A choice to realize that our consent is the primary tool in their hand; and refusal of that consent is ours.
A choice to accept that they manipulate us because we let them.
A choice to get real about stuff and see things for ourselves.
A choice to stop stereotyping and over-generalizing.
A choice to look at people as individuals present here and now; and not as copy-pastes of a past we want to lay on the present.
A choice to look at incidents subjectively; and not with linkages we’re told to make between the present and an unhealthy past.
A choice to be aware of our thoughts and select thoughts that are constructive, creative, positive.
A choice to refrain from reacting or commenting to hateful posts on Facebook, to make sure its algorithm stops sending such posts our way.
A choice to live a mentally clean existence.
A choice, with a positive present, for a better future.
Where we are one.
© Apoorv Vikas
Counselor & Psychologist
Nigdi Pune India
#socialmedia #facebook #hate #biases #sensationalism #violence #conflict #ideology #terrorism #business #negative #positive #thought #thinking #emotion #feeling #sentiment #awareness #understanding #abuse #choice #present #future #manipulation #stereotype #care #prejudices #unrest #riots #resentment
Counselor Apoorva 