Being passive to what you don’t like

Rabbi Shergill

I am tempted. To hide behind well-spoken defence of confusion and passivity by iconic French philosophers and the gibberish of surrender by almost anyone on the streets of India. Sufficient range of camouflage there, you’d think. For some reason, the thick cover isn’t enough to cover the bareness of my conscience’s bottom. I’m desperate. I must find some courage in myself and others. I can’t again flake out at the slightest pushback. I cannot bear to puff my chest out in the shiny West, knowing full well I didn’t fight back home. I cannot take shelter in an identity that brooks no questioning. I need harmony between the individual and the social but I need so much more.

I try to trace — laughably and grandly — the origin of my alienation and through it, hopefully that of our collective apathy. I’m trying nothing less than the reverse engineering of my own wholeness.

It’s a subtly lit, luxuriously decorated restaurant, trays of hot food rest in our midst. Piped esoteric music knits 3D weaves with the Michelin-level aroma. I’m surrounded by people I should love. But I can see myself in their eyes. Vacant. Uninterested. Far away. ‘I should be more involved.’ I’m appalled by my own aloofness. But I do nothing. I have to go through this tunnel of indifference. There’s a purpose to it. I can feel its gravitational pull. Then, slowly, like the moon on a smoggy night, it reveals itself. Mercifully arranging itself into a sentence: You’re passive to what you don’t like. Phew! There goes the weight of scumbaggery off my head. I’m not a bad person, I’ve just run dry of liking.

Suddenly and briefly, you understand almost everyone and everything. You understand the aunty who gets restless if you want to discuss the 500 AQI outside her elegant drawing room, or the perceived lack of freedom with an ideologue, or the shocking state of aesthetics with an architect, or mediocrity with a music band, probity with a politician, nobility with a doctor, morality with a journalist or plain compassion with your average human being. We understand the premise, we grasp its gravity but do nothing about the issue as it requires liking something other than yourself. Anything. It’s just that our hypothalamuses have run bone dry. Shot. Empty. There’s no more oxytocin, the liking hormone, to be had. The junkie is all tapped out. Bottom of the barrel.

What sucks me in is the why of it. Why do we all lose it? Is it a biological inevitability like loss of hair or bone mass? Or is there a sociological, cultural, perhaps even topographical, layer to it? In all honesty, I’m out of my depth here. Shaping of something as all-encompassing as the human psyche is going to have layers I cannot begin to conceive. But being the vehla that I am and having taken out the best part of the day to write this article, or should I say blog(?), I feel no need to rein in my horses. So, with the help of some borrowed whips, here goes nothing. Giddy up!

‘Species being’. There! That’s the phrase I’ve been meaning to drop all of a day and half. Hegel, Marx, Feuerbach have all used it. But it’s Harvard professor Rajani Kanth’s musings on it that make me hum like a tuning fork. He contends that the current global way of life closely follows the path of its Euromodernist masters. Which “at its very zenith… leads us only to our… contemporary reality of a Casino Economy, a Video Culture, and a Techno-Fascist Polity [sic].” Woah! When you’re right, you’re right! Wait, there’s more. Sample these gems:

• “Fundamentally, the EM project was to stand all prior ideas about human culture on their head, and to reinvent all epistemologies…”
• “Its philosophy is worthless, its politics corrupt, and its economics simply heinous.”
• “We humans were atomised to the point of being viewed as mechanical robots, with society itself individuated…”
• “Our highest anthropic need is simply to huddle, not to spend life on a treadmill, in endless forced labours that serve mainly to enrich and empower others.”

Savour these in your own sweet time. Let me encapsulate the Professor’s ideas for you. Actually, it’s just the old origins story — demystified:

There existed an idyll. Its precarious balance maintained by instincts. The human primate sought light and warmth. The men were occasionally violent, the women consistently peaceable, like chimps and bonobos, respectively. Tribal affections and feminine nurturing ensured a state of grace for infinity. Then civilisation exploded. And about 400 years ago, Anglo-Normans, through the ideas of Euromodernism, enslaved the planet. It’s brought us to a point where only violent male fantasies rule while we are forced to exist in violation of our instinctive nature, destroying our habitat, locked in a death wish creating an endless train of pathologies. The salve is to re-claim our specie instincts and letting feminine grace heal us, hypothalamus and all.

Noble words indeed. How do we turn them into actions? My suggestion: by ensuring they are read in the institutions that shape us — classrooms, assemblies, spontaneous gatherings. In songs, in art, in verse, in prose, in sound, in silence, in love, in rage, in life, in death, in the face of a baton, to the face of a lover… until the words fire neurons, fire synapses, fire axons… and light up the world. 

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