India: Immunity and Introspection.
Daniel Dennett, in his book “Breaking The Spell”, gives the example of ants climbing to the top of blades of grass, and staying there, from which exposed position they are frequently eaten by grazing animals. It is impossible to explain this behavior until it is realised that the beneficiary is not the ant and her genes but a creature called lancet fluke which has taken over the brain of the ant and compelled it to follow this course of action. It is part of the lancet fluke’s reproductive cycle to be eaten by a sheep or cow.
Viruses obviously, also utilize the behavior of their hosts. They enter an organism and use the body’s responses to their presence, such as sneezing or excreting, to facilitate their passage to further unwilling hosts.
The lancet fluke, the virus, or any other organism furthering the spread of its own genes, has no malign intentions towards their hosts or, in fact, any intentions at all. What is being seen is a process that has evolved through natural selection and favors the genes of lancet fluke or virus, or whatever.
Memes
Unlike other animals, at some point in history we decided to move beyond the basic drives of food, shelter and mate, to achieve harmony in wider communities, to make individuals compromise in certain aspects so his or her drives don’t end up disrupting the harmony of the larger group. In short, we invented Culture, a complex mechanism of applying peer pressure on every individual.
In 1980s, Richard Dawkins proposed the concept of a ‘Meme’; it’s hard to fathom that something that has its roots in Evolutionary Biology has turned into a starkly different internet phenomenon, although the essence is same.
He proposed, that ideas and certain set of beliefs or Meme Complexes to be precise (Like a good story or some political ideology or a religion), propagate like a gene, it is a cultural equivalent of gene in rough terms. It gets propagated because it facilitates the propagation or sustainability of genetic lineages.
Things got a bit messy with the advent of mass scale communication systems and open more connected societies, with land, food, shelter and mate problem solved, the landscape of war shifted to culture, dogma and extremism took hold, brainwashing became easier with information flooding and altering the collective unconscious, everyone continually being bombarded with so much trivial information that our brain is just sedated, it’s not in a state to filter and sort and make sense of things.
India
Something worth noting, is that most of India’s issues are caused by not understanding that not only can we become hosts and victims of ideas and viruses but also propagators. We are failing to ward off the ideological equivalent of a virus for a long time. We’re only 70 years into independence and we’ve twice chosen leaders that have pushed us into a state of near totalitarianism. That’s 20 years, just 20 hopefully. The solution is not a very strong leader; it is building a better system that doesn’t require a very strong leader.
We are prone to fanaticism, we march in herds behind anyone who claims to have solutions to all the countries problems, and presents solutions that are often too simple and shallow. We are not thinking, we’re a country waiting to be told what to think, by twitter trends and media outlets.
We put too much faith in the possibility of finding a nearly divine individual who is competent, faithful and drenched in moral values, because who doesn’t love heroes? And also because we can blame our misfortune and misjudgement if that hero fails, we can hide ourselves from our own conscience behind the veil of pity. What’s more? We are willing to trade in our freedom for the sense of safety from whatever the political class is trying to scare us with — sometimes it’s a neighbouring country, sometimes the ultra rich class and sometimes it’s Muslims.
The whole country is crippled because, first we failed to develop enough widespread acceptance for intelligent individuals who can identify the presence of some seductive ideologies which take complex problems and offer simplistic solutions which lead to degradation of social and bureaucratic structures. Second we lack the humility to admit to our shortcomings as biological creatures, we think the virus is something that’s outside and is happening to other people living in denial that we are being randomly exterminated by an invisible virus.
Viruses and Ideas.
In a world so connected, with physically mobile biological agents moving via air travel and ideas being continually shot at the speed of light, through a planet wide always on network onto an ever present and always accessible space. We need immunity from viruses, biological and informational.
But, the problem is viruses are not malevolent by design, the damage they do is just a byproduct of their natural behaviour, neither are ideas weather it’s religious teachings or class or caste hierarchy, they are just too good to resist and by accidental design manage to fit into the grooves of our psyche. And while they may have been harmless or even advantageous to us through the course of evolution their effects are unpredictable when such ideas are unleashed in the world that is so connected and so populous.
The answer then, to the problem of getting infected with a potentially harmful idea or virus is perhaps is not in being intelligent, because as intelligent as we think we are, it’s not enough, it’s in humility, in admission of the limits of our ourselves — biologically and psychologically. In admitting that some things, whether they are viruses or ideologies, are either so sticky or so convincingly simple and attractive that we become agents of them, and then we live out their desires and ambitions, either it’s coughing when you get the virus or becoming mouthpiece of religious and political dogma. But the more people are infected the more the infection seems natural order of things, until it becomes obvious that the current order is not sustainable, and the price we pay for the unawareness of being possessed, is unrest and chaos.
Who knew that we had a collective immune system and that it needed to be fortified collectively in order for the individual to thrive. Each individual is so connected and so potent that a failure of personal responsibility can and has turned out to be fatal to potentially every human.
We realized a century ago that wealth flows like heat,and although the understanding is there in scientific community something that all of us should be realizing now is that viruses and ideas propagate similarly, they attack a weak host who is incapable of introspection or is immunologically unaware, take hold of him without him realizing it, and then make him act out the virus’ or the idea’s intentions (or their un-intentions.)
A large portion of what a Human Being is, resides outside the biology of a Human, that feature has brought us out from African grasslands into a techno-capitalistic globalized society, but it has also brought us religious extremism, tribalism and fanaticism. We may keep longing for a charismatic hero and a nearly omnipotent leader, but we may have to learn to do without one, often, and maybe always.
