To Think or Not to Think
Imagination, the domain of every living species, yet dominated by one species, man. It is precisely this virtue of humans that has made them superior to other living species. What ignites our imagination is the very essence of what makes us dream. We wonder and are amazed by all that surrounds us. Our precocious asset of questioning all that occurs has made us rise like a Phoenix over the last many millenniums. We dream to create and destroy to create. Similar to how we die and then live on in the next generation and so on! Death is the very essence of our creativity. Knowing that we are mortals keeps us going, an insatiate hunger to appease the voracious need to progress with time before we meet our destined end.
As man settled down to an agrarian life from his years as a hunter gatherer, his intellect was drawn away from the toil of gathering food. The weapons he developed made it easier for him to kill the prey, cultivation of plants and domestication of animals made it easier to obtain food. As a result his mind was left free from the vicissitudes of physical labor. Death on account of foraging for food became less frequent and humans evolved in to a species who vowed to rise up from food gatherers and procreators to being creationists. Man was able to take on the mantle of his evolutionary role, to tame nature and wonder in amazement at the vastness of the universe.
With time our progress was thwarted by human greed for territorial ambitions. We craved for power and began to enslave our own race, superiority of race, ethnicity, color; religion and culture enslaved our minds. For the next many millenniums we fought and killed our own race, we became our worst antagonist. The progress dreamt by our ancestors when they began a settled life was overtaken by rampaging conquerors. The age of empires thwarted much of scientific progress and industrial advancement; man became ritualistic and lost the verve to see beyond the essence of conquests. Then came the age of the machines, to aid the conquest of man and transport wealth from geographies. Superior conquering civilizations used the vast differences of the conquered people to rule them. Colonies were ruled by the colonizers with the aid of the natives. The age of colonization annihilated many of the heterogeneous races in our cult to create a homogeneous man with homogeneous beliefs. The newly acquired wealth and relative peace enjoyed by the western civilization, made them achieve scientific progress and advancement. Weapons of mass destruction were manufactured. The gun and then the machine gun and their many ilk’s in various forms were the single most dastardly inventions, that made killing a sport; from the combats that enshrined human ability to use the sword and shield and other benign weapons. Physical strength was no longer a pre requisite to be a combatant. Civilians who were largely shielded from rampaging warmongers became casualties. Death became mass extinction and very easy to inflict. The invention of modern weaponry made man a merchant of death in its very real sense. The wars from the 17th till the 21st century and even today never are tales of bravery or swordsmanship or chivalrous conduct, they are tales of sordid death inflicted by machines that has crumbled the very spirit of man and made life so very tenuous. But humanity didn’t perish in numbers as we invented drugs to combat ailments and disease. We conquered diseases that lengthened the average age of man, aided his survival and the age of procreation began, where humans began to live long and their progeny outlived the pang of child mortality. With a burgeoning population, we began to enslave them in the age of industrialization. Untold miseries were wrought upon salves and indigenous people and their beliefs, most were exterminated and many forcibly changed to aid and suit the likes of the conquerors. During these tumultuous years of our civilization, philosophers and men and women of learning imparted wisdom to their fellow beings. But most of their messages were warped by us in needless philosophical bundles; the dubious interpretation of their compassionate wisdom became a devious tool for justifying our ends. A bevy of interpretations to suit our immediate needs began to overwhelm human thoughts. The freedom of thought always suppressed was further endangered.
In the 21st century our zeal to imprison humanity has not dwindled. The new slave master is technology and its rampaging whiplash, the social media. We have created self sustaining prisons where we remain glued to the addiction of social media and the internet. The opium war of the 19th century was an attempt to kill the imagination of masses; by getting them addicted to the narcotic. In similar vein social media has become a narcotic that shapes our conduct. We have become less social on account of social media. New friends and acquaintances are so easy to obtain, contacts with old friends and acquaintances has become a reality. And all of a sudden our need to be heard and expressed has found a fountainhead of excitement. Our innate need to have an opinion and express our innermost thoughts to the world has found an outlet. But let us take a step back and question whether special media is indeed as liberating as it sounds or has it further endangered out spirits and chained our imagination and thoughts. Our addiction gives us less time to be social animals. We feel connected to the universe when in actuality we are not. We impersonate the many characters that fire our imagination and that gives rise to a completely new personality on the social media; it aids the birth and sustains many complex traits within us. Our uncalibrated thoughts have found takers and we unwittingly fall suspect to propaganda and warped ideologies. We have finally found an outlet for our boredom. Books, poem, literature and debates have been substituted by inchoate ramblings and lectures by uneducated folks. The guidance of a teacher no longer felt necessary and access to so much information has made all of us knowledgeable. Really! Our knowledge travels with our access to the internet. We have allowed the internet and its vast archives of information to replace our thoughtful mind. Machines store our knowledge; do our calculation whilst our mind revels in its freedom having relieved itself from the burden of thought and imagination. Imagination and creativity is a very strenuous practice and takes a lot of energy, access to so much information has made us intellectually dormant. Thoughts no longer excite us, our memory no longer strains and we are educated that it actually makes little sense to remember all the burden of some much knowledge. What we aren’t told is that the ability of our mind to judge and process a decision is only possible if our conscious and sub conscious mind stores all what we learn. That storage bin is not the mind any longer; it is the social media and the internet. Hence our benumbed mind becomes a slave to deviant ideologies and we become besotted by evil. Evil and dark thoughts prey on an unsuspecting mind and completely rob it of its ability to question and fathom ideologies. The doctrine of freedom of thought has become endangered by the spread of social media. Our imagination has met its grave yard as plagiarism replaces an inventive mind.
The ache of creativity and the struggle that an imaginative mind undergoes has chiseled humankind in what we are today. Our penchant for questioning the obvious and not following the masses has given rise to prophets, philosophers, scientists, statesmen, benign leaders and statesmen. Much of human literature and poetry was at its most excellent when we had no access to the internet and social media. Our creative juices flowed to write, draw, sculpt, invent and discover before the dawn of the internet and social media. We explored and conquered the known world and created works of art that till today remain a hallmark of excellence.
The internet and social media has robbed us of our free time as we get influenced and straight jacketed by what we read. Our mind is getting plagiarized by the excessive availability of propaganda and doctrines. The very essence of the mind remains not to be influenced but to chart its own course of creativity. This precocious faculty is under threat. We are under the yoke of thought slavery and soon will be dominated by an age of machines more powerful than humans who will think for us whilst we would merely be cattle fodder for them, who will procreate and slave for them.
Future generations cannot become slaves to machines of our own invention, humans have to walk and co-habit this world with other humans. Cohabit not the internet, and social media but the physical world. The allurement of the internet and social media has made us voyeuristic and far removed from the reality of life. It is time we self regulate and restrict our uninhibited access to the internet and social media to less endanger the human species.
Many would contradict what I wrote and state the positive impact of the social media and internet. I do not deny that this invention has helped mankind. But every invention if not used judiciously tends to become a tool that becomes a harbinger of destruction. Knowledge without guided discourse is mere information. It requires a discerning and imaginative mind to dissect information and question beliefs, customs and notions.
To think is liberating and not to think is tyrannical. The choice is ours!
Mufaddal Idris Khumri
mkhumri 