Day 249 - Our Love for those closest May be our Greatest Weakness as a Specie

 

 

Before you come to conclusions just hear me out and see for yourself:

I watch quite a few TV series and movies. All TV series has the main actors that do not die, because then it would be the end of the series (unless you are watching game of thrones). In action series you usually see allot of killing going on - the good guys getting the bad guys sort of thing.

When you really look at it, we don’t really care about the people getting killed in the shows. The shows always wants you to care about the main characters, after watching a few episodes of a show you like you tend to like some the actors. Let’s say the main actor is caught and trying to escape, you cheer for the main actor, when the actor fights a bad guy and kills him we do not care about the bad guy. We don’t care that he might be a father and leaving a wife to fend for herself and feed her children. All we care about is the main character getting out to safety.

There is this show called “Arrow”. The guy goes after bad guys, can’t exactly remember who, but it was like big cats like corrupt people or something like that. Now, he doesn’t kill the guy - no – he threatens him to change his ways. Now we the audience see this as good, because he doesn’t kill the guy. But on his way to get to this big baddie he kills any and all minions in his way.

This is what shows do – It is made in such a way that we care more about the main actors, because then we form kind of a relationship towards the actors, but when someone dies in the show that nobody knows ( like a bad guy or even a random person the bad guy kills) we really couldn’t care less. Sure its just a show, but this is how we are in the real world.

When someone close to us die we feel that loss immensely, but when someone else dies that we do not know it does not really affect us. Even celebrities, if one your favorite celebs die you feel sad about it, but hear about 5000 people that died thus far from Ebola we don’t care about them. All we do care about when we hear this is hope we don’t get Ebola.

Basically we only care about that which affects us directly, anything else is not of concern to us. And there lies the big problem why the world is the way it is. Those who are in need of help cannot help themselves and those who are able to help do not care enough to help. And so the endless cycle continues and the world does not change. Now there is not problem with caring for those close to you, but we need to greatly expand that circle of care.

What we need to understand is that the people who are in need could very well have been us in another life, what if that was you suffering and no why to get yourself out? The only way forward is to change this particular nature of ourselves where we realize and understand the suffering of others enough to do something about it. This world will simply continue its course unless we change our nature. Start here