So much has happened in 2021, so little has occurred.
Coups d’état, lockdowns, controversies, wars, destructive climate disasters, 2021 was a terrible year. There is no denying there were some sparks of hope. For example, we saw the massive collaboration effort that contributed to the delivery of almost nine billion Covid jabs. This endeavour was not without troubles along the way, such as uneven access to vaccines or variants that seem to evade the vaccine. 2021 also brought the world’s first 3d printed school, built in just 18 hours, bringing expectations that worldwide classroom shortage can be alleviated.
But then we had weeks put into a cosmic blender, and whoosh, they went into an amorphous grey mass of resignation, placidity, despair, terror, apathy. Is it any wonder that at times, we couldn’t avoid slipping into a limbo, waiting for something to happen, for the vaccines to come, the lockdowns to end, the old lifestyle we knew to come back?
It felt like this year was the year of rhinoceros, after Eugène Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros. This play is a sharp satire of how regular people, captured by mass propaganda, transformed one by one into rhinoceros, violent beasts that attacked and chased their acquaintances.
You are either with us or against us. We would tell ourselves stories that others denied our present and future. Rhinoceros outside, but my tribe inside the walled gardens of social media keeps me safe. Or so we think.
Because what the algorithms learned during the pandemic and started to apply cruelly is that we can close the eyes of the dead, but often we can’t open the eyes of the living.
Every generation has a different torment, and Charles Dickens’ quote from A Tale of Two Cities describing events from hundreds of years ago sums up 2021 perfectly:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Still, although we might find solace in other generations’ accounts, we need space to be allowed to grieve our loss of normalcy. We all are tired and scarred from the known pandemic and the silent pandemics (burnout in medical staff, rise in domestic violence, mental health issues, and who knows how many others).
There is a quote in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain that shows another light on the “us versus them” narrative:
Freedom always comes with responsibility. We are free to speak and act, but we are not free from the consequences of what we say and do. We might not care about those consequences, or we might not agree that those consequences are justified, but they nonetheless have costs that we all pay.
How do we progress from tribes to a society? How do we move from empty rhetorics to meaningful conversations? How do we build those invisible threads to connect us? How do we string those words that make us feel that the sun will rise again when we talk more and more and hear less and less?
I discussed in another article about the book written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, based on the concept that we use metaphors to structure our worldview.
For example, we perceive arguments as war.
I take a position.
He attacked my point of view.
I won that argument.
I’ve never lost an argument with him.
Do you disagree? Okay, shoot!
I lost my ground.
But what could be told about a society where arguments are not seen through war metaphors but of dance?
…the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. It would seem strange even to call what they were doing “arguing.”
We are not predisposed to see an argument as dance because we are too inclined to avoid feeling vulnerable, emptied of our ego. We might make conversation as dance on a personal level, within our tribe, but as a whole, as a society?
Tomorrow’s bones will not be born until we acknowledge that life is not a fairy tale. We should not perceive all of the others in binary values and reduce them to caricatures. Sometimes, the villain does have a heart, and the hero has dark flaws.
However, 2021 is almost finished, so let’s not end this article on a serious tone.