“So the question “Is the World changing or is there something wrong with it”, arises just because of our lack of understanding of what’s happening or human inhibition to change or is something wrong with it?”
Gnosis, if simply translated from Greek to, English means knowledge, but when we look at its proper, usage what comes to light is what it means to have a proper understanding of a topic derived from knowledge about it. But how does this relate to the question: is the world changing or is there something wrong with it?
Well in today’s world, there is an influx of limitless knowledge. Today we know everything from what’s happening in a pop star’s life to how many people are dying in the Israel-Palestine, conflict but we know nothing at the same time. One may ask how that is possible. Well, the answer is simple: “Do you know the backbone of the current society?” The chances are you have no idea about it, but the answer lies right in front of you: steel, plastic, concrete and ammonia. You take any one of these out of the equation, and the functioning of the world comes to a virtual halt. The backbone of industrialist society is not of the essence here. What matters is what it represents; even though we reap the benefits of the current setup and blame it for all our problems, we still don’t understand the very fundamentals of its workings.
So the question “Is the world changing or is there something wrong with it?”, arises just because of our lack of understanding of what’s happening or human inhibition to change, or is something wrong with it? To truly answer this question, we will need to look at multiple different factors, but at its very base, can be drawn to five things, or one might say five keys.
It’s common sense to not touch a vessel right off the stove or is it? Ever wondered why it’s common sense, is it that your hand will get burned or you will hurt yourself? But how do you know that? Someone must have done it before and told you about it or you might have made the mistake yourself. so common sense is usually knowledge that people have of their everyday world and activities which is nothing more than memory about things in routine and this leads us to our first key “collective human memory”.
What collective human memory means, is nothing more than what society remembers as a whole about past events. A simple example is the World War anyone alive during the World War is either dead or on the verge of dying, almost all of us know about it, and yet even though we all know about it, the great horrors and destruction it brought upon us, it all looks like a distant dream to us written in books, recorded in documentaries and taught in schools. In reality, we have no real understanding of what happened even though we have almost everything on record about the war. The reason for this is that almost every 20-25 years there is a shift in generation where leaders change, kids grow up and a new generation comes which has been brought up in vastly different situations than their predecessors and this cycle when repeated 3-4 times leads to life changing events being erased from common memory.
Social media has exacerbated this process. The problems of the ‘digital age’ aren’t new problems like these have existed before as well but what we are seeing is that ‘digital’ acts as a magnifier. Today horrifying events from all over the globe reach us and this has made us numb to such things. But memory is only useful for things that have already happened. So how does memory play a role in things that have never happened before? In reality, even though a tech and AI revolution might be coming for the first time it’s not the first revolution that has changed how society functions take the printing revolution or the industrial revolution, they had multiple advantages but also brought problems and negatives with itself. So even though this might not have exactly happened before we have experienced similar events before as well we just don’t know about it, this does not mean that everything is fine and there is nothing wrong it just highlights the fact our lack of memory might be one of the reasons for this question to arise but we need to understand what is happening and for that, we need to understand how are decisions made. This leads to our second key Center of power.
Who decides what is right or wrong? What defines our morals or ethos? Why do we even accept them? Where are they even written down? When do we draw a line on them? The answers all boil down to who is sitting in power and who influences the society both the individual and the masses and here comes the centre of power into play. In the contemporary world, the current centre of power is no other than the United States of America. Yes some views say otherwise and like JS Mills said we cannot be sure what is held to be true is true until other conflicting ideas clash with it but for now we can say with surety in terms of economic power, political influence and military strength USA is an undisputed leader and thus the centre of power for our generations. But these terms have always changed throughout history, what is right has always been subject to change, and so has the centre of power. When looking at history we can see that civilizations have risen from scratch, reached the pinnacle of power and disappeared into the annals of history and with that how we look at things and process them has also changed radically.
One can take up a very simple example to prove this all we need to do is Imagine a bank that gives loans to people without even cross-verifying their details and then renames the loans and packages them into a risk-free good and sells it back to the people who are taking out the loans and the government lets it happens and even make money out of it. then suddenly the people who got the loans without any checks are unable to pay them back surprising right? But moving ahead the bank hides it again and repeats the process again and again until they can not do it anymore and then people lose their homes and jobs and their source of income and futures gets destroyed. Seems like a very elaborate scam dose it is not this is exactly what happened in the 2008 subprime crisis.
Though this is an oversimplification of what happened this does explain the essence of it. During the whole crisis, only one person ever went to jail and no one took accountability, the US government bailed out the entire banking system with the taxpayer’s money the same people who got screwed over because of it. They could do it because they had absolute power even if it affected the entire world now imagine if this had happened during the Cold War would have been a completely different situation. Nonetheless, things for imagination should be kept to the imagination but the point here is how the people in power can mould things to their benefit and the same is being done today. Black Lives Matter is a great example of this, corporations made billions because of it. At the same time, people in Africa are still dying because of the greed of the neo-colonialists but nobody cares about their lives. Are they not black people why only black people are they not fellow human people like us? What we need to understand is that the current system has radically changed how we look at things and understand them and this happened at the fastest pace ever recorded in history and it is still happening new emerging powers are trying to challenge this current system which is made to favour the USA. This whole process has impacted each one of us whether we realise it or not and whenever any such process takes place it makes us question things about the very fundamental aspects of life and thus the question, is the world changing or is there something wrong with it? Now that we know why the question exists let us look at things that are happening around us to answer the question. This leads us to our third key the current global scenario.
When we look at what’s happening all around the world some horrifying things come to light, some of them have been in the limelight some have not, but they do exist. All of them whether it is the Israel-Palestine issue that is being talked about all over the globe or the Sudan conflict which is relatively sidelined. They exist and even if we turn a blind eye to them they are there. There have been some kind of political, economic or military issues in every corner of the globe. We have reached an all-time high debt the income gap between rich and poor is becoming bigger every day, cost of living is growing at a rate incomparable to income growth. In regions like Latin America people are starving to death due to inefficient government and the greed of countries and corporations even when billions of tons of food is wasted every year. Africa has been in constant conflict since the post-Cold War era and nobody seems to bat an eye.
While the developed nations have experienced what is called an era of peace brought by the US hegemony the majority of the world population has horrible living conditions poor quality of life and multiple other issues. These events are something that should not be happening with all the technological advancement we have made and the resources we have and no metric or ideology can justify it. Let’s take the Israel-Palestine conflict, while the world thinks it’s a religious conflict the root cause of why it has been stretched so long and why the Western world has never batted an eye to it is because of the great economic importance of strip of Ghaza, the important trade routes it holds but when Russia does the same thing for itself suddenly it becomes wrong,
What can simply be understood is that while things might seem okay at the surface levels, there are multiple problems at the intrinsic level, issues that should be dealt with but are being swept under the rug. What is happening all around the globe is something inherently wrong and cannot be justified under any circumstances. With this, we come to our fourth key the political and ideology scenario.
Currently, the entire globe is going through a political and ideological shift, right leaders and parties have started to gain power all over the globe ranging from India to the USA. this has led people to become more and more ill-tolerant towards contradictory ideas moreover there has been a lack of space for contradictory ideas to grow and nurtured. Moreover, Social justice movements have gained momentum, advocating for issues such as racial equality, gender rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. the global focus on climate change has intensified, with countries adopting or revising policies to address environmental challenges. International climate agreements, such as the Paris Agreement, continue to shape global efforts to combat climate change.
But what does all of this mean in the context of what’s happening around us? With people becoming more radicalised in their ways of thinking, more and more voices are being raised about wrong things but at the same time there has been an increasing communal divide moreover intolerance among people has also grown. Respect for ideas different from our own has dwindled and individual liberty has been dying down. In countries like Italy, India USA Hard right leaders with extreme ideology have been gaining the confidence of the people, there has been a rise in nationalistic sentiments throughout the globe and people are becoming more and more hostile towards each other, acceptance and tolerance are dying which is not good for any society. So while there have been positive shifts they have also been accompanied by negatives as well. With this, we arrive at our fifth and final key the current social set-up.
With the rise of social media and corporate culture, the way we interact has drastically changed. There have been huge lifestyle changes. We have at hand a generation with one of the highest underage substance usage not only that mental health problems have reached record high. The corporate culture and social media have dehumanized a lot of aspects of life. Social media daily exposes us to unrealistic standards moreover in this age of information and technology we are so overloaded with information that we forget things faster we move over things faster. All of this has brought an artificial aspect to our lives that is messing with our sense of reality. A very simple example of this short-form video is something that has not been in our lives for a very long time but has become an integral part of everyone’s lives be it Children to adults for better or worse. There can be endless aspects to all of this but to put it out in a concise manner the current way we interact in the social set-up or the new lifestyle standards are something that has had multiple negative impacts upon the life of an individual and skewed our sense of time reality and what’s happening around us leading to a lot of problems,
So now that we have all our keys in place what is the final verdict is the world changing or is there something wrong with it? Now that we have a better understanding of what is happening around us and how it pans out. We can say one thing for sure there are some things that are happening right now that are wrong and should not happen but also that we are going through a period of change at a pace that has never been experienced before. so yes multiple things are wrong right now in the global system and that eerie feeling that nothing is the same and things are just continuously getting worse is there but things have to be wrong before we can realise that, understand that and work on it to change things and right now we are going through that exact process. So yes there is something wrong with the current global system but at the same time, things are changing as well for better or for worse.
By:-Aashank Singh