One of favourite quotes is the Joker’s dialogue in the The Dark Knight You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even when the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I told the press that, like, a gang-banger would get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics . Because it’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everybody loses their minds!
As a teenager forming my views of the world, this quote felt revelatory and horrifying. Suddenly it made me question what ugly and insane parts of the human story have we lightly brushed over, edited out or numbed ourselves to? I grew up in Bombay. It is a true city of multitudes. Travelling across you will casually pass the world’s richest home and also the world largest slum . India ranks amongst the highest in wealth concentration. When people speak of India1, India2 and India3; they speak as if these are distant and distinct lands . Yet they exist shoulder to shoulder. The migrant labourer at construction site takes orders from the project manager who takes calls from the builder . Their paths cross all the time. Yet there is no violence, anger or frustration at this divide. Only muted suffering from the poor and apathy from the rich . This is all part of the plan; no deviation from the script here.
Why do we not discover that the plan is horrifying? Unknowingly we get fed a very homogenous information diet. Our parents likely came from similar backgrounds, they lived in a place with people of the same economic strata, we watched the same TV channels, followed the same people on twitter, read the same books, absorbed the same values, and unsurprisingly came to the same opinions with piddly differences thrown in to show our intellectual horsepower. Our “truths” of the world are also wrapped deeply with our identities. Slimy tax-evading businessmen are ready with excuses about how the government is wasteful but have never ploughed a penny from their savings into a good cause . Neither have they made a phone call to a government servant for a purpose other than getting their own business issues cleared.
You need to peel open the blinders from your eyes, so you can get closer to the truth. But seeing the truth needs you to slow down, observe, think and reflect; and then say WTF! Nobody has time for that. “Mindfulness” and “Exposure” might be the simplest tools we have to see things more clearly . Take a day off, do your commute slowly, ask your co-worker about the rooms that don’t show up in the zoom background, subscribe to the enemy’s Youtube channel, follow the other side on twitter, talk to new people, watch documentaries then look at criticisms of it . Absorb. Assimilate. Think.
Finally, some great related tweets.
Omair Ahmed’s thread on shallow narrative of the “well-handled” first wave.
What defines new by Ingrid Srinath