Two Hot Wars & Many Cold Ones
Case for a collective reset (Edited)
Edited On (Jan 12th) — “What does a collective reset look like?”
Recent global events have triggered a shared sense of shock and sorrow. After haphazardly consuming news updates, we eventually put those events into our personal context and move on. Despite the differing details, these incidents appear remarkably similar. The common thread is that an ancient hatred bubbled over and the two sides had justification for further escalation.
The other commonality is that it’s now collectively accepted that with the right push, these cold conflicts will eventually ignite. There’s not much the world’s “hall monitors” can do. The UN is often seen as a toothless bureaucracy setup to fail on purpose and do the bare minimum.
So let’s examine human conflict by considering its context, understanding the actual cost, and exploring our potential long-term solutions.
The Human Context
From ancient times our primary way of surviving as a group has been to tell stories. Learnings passed down generations that provided common wisdom and connection to each other.
Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money, and human rights. — Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens)
Over time our stories evolved & we developed a keen sense of being in or out of a group. Mainly to get control over some limited resource, which led to rivalries. Eventually one tribe prevailed and gained control. Even our more recent history is ripe with examples of European colonizers building their empires over less fortunate tribes.
Membership to a tribe shaped our identity.
21st Century Context
We have come a long way in our understanding of the world. Science has given us tools to control energy, split the atom, land on the Moon, map our genome, cure incurable diseases and send our robotic ambassadors beyond the solar system. Globalization has brought us even closer.
What hasn’t caught up is the collective wisdom of the human race. We still cling to minute differences that our ancestors cared about. Even though science tells us that we are actually not very different from each other.
Cosmic Perspective
No one can present the Cosmic perspective better than Carl Sagan. Here he is talking about the global balance of terror during the last big Cold War and the need for being one planet —
Why Do We Still Fight?
Let’s take the obvious “generational conflicts over resources or religion” off the table. The next obvious answer is “outside interest”. There are various types of interests here but the two main that rise to the top and feed into each other are — “Political” and “Corporate” (ahem MIC).
It is still remarkably easy to divide people into camps. Outside interest groups understand it, practice it and benefit from it. The old strategy of “divide & conquer” could not be more appropriate in this digital world. Elections can be swayed, opinions can be changed and most importantly, doubts can be sowed by a click of a button.
On top of that, we have incentivized a closed-system that creates extreme winners and losers. The top 1% believe in survival of the richest, instead of common good (
).So ask yourself — who really benefits from this chaos?
Real Cost
Let’s again put the obvious answers like “pain & suffering” aside. The one thing that doesn’t get talked about is the distraction all this causes from existential crises like Climate Change. That’s one issue that impacts everybody. Our future generations cannot survive it without a collective and focused action now.
Climate change will also make these conflicts more intense as natural resources disappear and weather patterns become more extreme & unpredictable. This has happened before and will happen again.
Outside interest groups don’t really want us to talk about these real costs. Every little distraction helps. Hot wars help the most.
Our Options
I have no illusions that these ancient conflicts can be solved by next Monday. As a parent, the world is about the same (if not more) hate-filled as the world my parents lived through. Technological progress has made it brittle. Nuclear proliferation has made it dangerous. Climate change is making it volatile.
In SciFi terms, we are more likely to live out the hatred depicted in The Expanse than the dream of curious explorers from Startrek.
So how do we improve the odds of our kids living in a better world by the next decade? My two cents here are to collectively aim higher — a collective reset. Without it, we’re primed for a repeating circle of violence at the whims of external influences.
What does a collective reset look like? (Updated)
We need an internal reset first to examine your biases towards others. Do those biases even matter now? More importantly, is it worth passing those to your children?
The external reset is how you analyze the information that comes to you. Is it coming from a reliable source? Does it have any additional context? Can you recognize verifiable facts?
Putting these together, hopefully it ignites your curiosity to learn more and dig deeper into important topics. Instead of relying on sound-bite analysis prevalent on the news these days.
A good use case is any news around Climate Change. There are plenty of sources of information on it and multitudes of opinions. Can you identify denialism vs doomism? Does climate action sound like the right thing to do?
Wrapping Up
We are a long way from accepting that we are all the same race — the Human race. Can we begin to find some common ground, become one tribe and tell new stories? Stories of climate renewal, compassion, equity and scientific literacy.
Perhaps those stories can begin to pass hope to the future generation, rather than the hate of our past. “Every child begins the world again (Thoreau)” — only if we let them!
