Friday, January 24, 2025

How to keep your head in all the chaos


People say all kinds of things, there are divergent viewpoints, you don't know what is right, your head is spinning! 

How to deal with this situation? 


The thing is to ignore what everyone says, and build your own conclusions from ground up. 

Most people do not like to think or reason. They will blindly accept whatever is being fed to them. It actually doesn't matter which side they are on, both sides in any debate are like that. 

Therefore, for most people, what works is, pick the view / book / guru / ideology they are comfortable with, and stick with it. 

Pray five times a day facing a particular direction and heaven is assured! Sure. 

Observe vrat for 40 days, then visit this temple, and heaven is assured! Sure. 

Those who lay down those guidelines for people to follow, hopefully are evolved souls, who understand the second order and third order consequences of their prescriptions. 

When those people who lay down those rules are venal politicians, morally deficient warlords, or big businesses whose only objective is to make money, is when things start turning ugly. 

People being people will still blindly follow what the institutions tell them. Which is why one of the first things the powerful do is to capture the institutions, like Bureaucracy, Judiciary, Media. 

Then they apply the rules that Goebbels turned into an art form for the Nazis. Repeat their lies often and in so many different ways that people start believing it's the truth. 

The individual who is not taken in by this propaganda either because he knows better or because he is immune to hypnosis, watches bewildered as the world around him goes mad. When he dares to point it out, and most will not dare, he is in danger of getting lynched. Because people don't like anyone who tries to shatter a shared collective illusion. 

The sane individual is one who, as everyone around him is losing their heads, keeps his composure, and charts his own path. 

The sane individual who is wise does this unobtrusively and quietly. The sane one who is foolish tries to convince others of his point of view. That is not a wise thing to do, no herd likes an outlier if he is too vociferous in his protestations. Outliers are tolerated to an extent so long as they keep their mouth shut.

For the outlier who thinks who knows better, and I find myself in this situation sometimes, a sobering thought is to think of himself as the inmate in the lunatic asylum, who, looking out at the passers by, thinks they are all mad, little realising that he is the one who is in the asylum!

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