Saturday, December 1, 2012

Interconnectivity, Society, Empathy, and What I Believe

I feel as though my core principals - the ideas I revere the most, intellectually - are constantly running in the back of my brain. I don't think that I clearly express these specific principals enough. I've never produced a work that encompasses these principals, and I suppose it's time. What exactly do I truly believe? Well, my core principals essentially stem from my strong support of a few basic concepts: the interlocked nature of life, the position that people are largely malleable products of society, and the importance of empathy.

The popular and perhaps peculiar sentiment about time travel that puts forth the notion that killing a butterfly in the past can have drastic impacts on the course of history is an idea that has always intrigued me, and I think this is because it's a sentiment that makes immediate sense to me and a sentiment that seems to have significance beyond time travel. Time travel really is a goofy concept in general, but that's another discussion entirely. The point that is actually relevant to this piece is this: We're all connected. We're all in this together, and if we work with that idea in mind, it's ultimately best for us all. Selfishness, and vitriolic group formations with the sole intent of beating other groups - whether it be intellectually, physically, emotionally, etc. - is destructive. Acts of kindness for the greater good matter, generally no matter how small.

Us being so interconnected lends itself to the idea that society has a large impact on who we are and what we do. If you're reading this you probably don't support the enslavement of African Americans, but I don't think I could be so confident in that statement with an audience from the 1800s. I don't feel any anger towards homosexuality as I realize that this does not have negative effects towards me or society, and a lot of that is owed to my upbringing based more or less around the concept that we should live and let live. It's my opinion and I reserve the right to take pride in it, but I'm also honest in regard to how I got this position. A man who kills in cold blood is a murderer, and that was his decision, but we similarly have to be honest with how he got to that position and fairly handle crime and punishment accordingly.

It's an idea that I separate in my mind from the two ideas above, but empathy may be precisely the driving force behind them both. Our lives and actions are so dependent upon societal effects, and our own personal happiness and prosperity is so contingent upon how we work together, or against each other. Empathy, therefore, is crucial. Removing yourself from your own mindset and culture and thought-process and placing yourself in another's shoes is crucial to helping other people, as it tells us how to help other people. And a group effort that helps us all as much as possible is, again, crucial to our own happiness and prosperity.

It's not always pretty. It's not immediately pleasurable for just about all of us to be interlocked with certain types of people. Societies have a tendency to latch into and propagate arbitrary hatred. Empathy sometimes just shows us how wicked and perhaps hopeless some of us are, or at least have become. But if we're going to come to grips with reality and make the best of it, I'd say we need to accept that we're interconnected in a way that calls for working together, I'd say we need to understand societal influence and use it to our advantage, and I'd say we need to use empathy to understand not just who we are but why we are that way and how we got there. That's what I believe.

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