In the best of times, we find it very difficult to question our belief systems. It can be profoundly disorienting and destabilizing. But people tend to cling for dear life to evidence-free beliefs and narratives even more tenaciously during times of stress because they buttress our sense of belonging.
In the light of the Israel-Palestine conflict in recent months and deteriorating discourse in various digital public squares that inevitably ends up with name calling, smearing and calls for censorship, people repeatedly demonstrate their inability to rise above the unconscious ideological soup they swim in, their sense of tribal belonging and childhood indoctrination.
Media and academic institutions in the West have responded very differently to the atrocities of October 7 compared to the atrocities unfolding in Gaza every day since October 7. This is a phenomenon being repeated nationally at every organizational and media equivalent that doesn’t allow them to be honest about what is happening. The conscious and unconscious biases there are ripe for analysis. I believe this phenomenon has a lot to do with the unconscious organizing principles and assumptions, ideologies of organizations and the people “belonging” to them.
We unconsciously create the environment we perceive to suit our own dogmas, emotions, and aesthetics. Every nervous system perceives a different universe made up out of some common signals coming to all of us, and most defects of communication, and consequent behavioral and relational problems are caused by the fact that we think everyone is living in the same 'world' as us. When we find out they do not “belong” to our world, we think they are either 'crazy' or 'evil' or 'mad' or 'bad.'
If one can consistently and forcefully indoctrinate someone from an early age and then give them a mainstream ideological/religious "tribe" with which to identify in their indoctrination, the cognitive glitches in these newly-evolved brains of ours act as sentries protecting those implanted worldviews which become even more firmly entrenched sometimes in the face of opposing evidence. Add in a history "saturated with collective trauma" reactivated by present day violence and belonging can indeed "gather the gravity of a black hole, where nothing else matters.”
This sounds bleak. But we CAN escape the event horizon.
For me, growing up in a fundamentalist, religious dictatorship like Pakistan, I was taught to live in fear of and hate our Indian neighbors who might attack us at any time. I was taught to believe in the supremacy of one religion above all others. I was taught that this religion needed our state to defend it and we, as Pakistanis were the ultimate expression of the arc of history that inevitably bent towards humanity united under one God.
That spell of ideological indoctrination and belonging ruptured like a million balloons when I was authentically exposed to the writings of the great minds of the Western intellectual tradition. I felt that my intuitive conception of a higher power had more in common with Spinoza than anything I was taught to believe and was indoctrinated with in Islamic studies. When it came to religion, I agreed more with Freud than Mohammad! I had more Jewish heroes at one point in my development than muslim heros. From Kafka and Sarte to Noam Chomsky. After many years following the rigid path of the New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, I found myself coming full circle with the love, compassion and flexibility of Muslim Sufis like Maulana Rumi and Baba Bulleh Shah whom Spinoza actually had more in common with than he did with Western philosophers like Plato or Descartes. I learned about fighting injustice, facing oppression with integrity, deception with honesty from the civil rights activist, W.E.B Dubois.
At the same time, I am also in recovery from the colonization of my mind by Western ideology. I learned from Franz Fanon about the idea that colonialism encourages the colonized population to aspire to the experience and position of the oppressor through its emphasis on language. I had gone to an English private school in what was a former British colony. I learned to speak and write perfect English, cementing my place among the elitist “brown sahibs” whose destiny was seemingly to rule over the unwashed, uneducated masses who spoke only Urdu. In school we had focused more on Shakespeare than Mirza Ghalib. The end result of which was, in retrospect, as Fanon describes, a type of alienation from my own real heritage, culture, and way of life. That remained the case until I was able to find my way back to it after integrating and learning the good things I could from the West. I am still exploring and learning about my heritage today although I never felt that I need to “decolonize” my mind of everything Western.
I also realized at a young age that all of the hyper nationalism and constant drum beats of war with India were just a way for the military establishment of Pakistan to stay relevant and stay in power. They manufactured textbooks that fed us a bastardized version of our own history that erased large parts of our unbelievably rich Hindu past, glorified only the Muslim histories and villainized Hindu India, to keep us identified with an artificially constructed, confessional nation state born in bloody mayhem and murder and to manufacture consent for an insane military budget to fight aggressive neighbors who were always baying for its blood. There is only one other state in the world like that. So, I speak about Israel even though I am not Israeli, because I know instinctually, in my bones what it feels like to be raised in Israel. I speak because the silenced cannot speak for themselves.
While all of this this shattered the belief system of my childhood indoctrination, it gave me the building blocks to consciously construct a new ideology as an active agent and architect of my own belief system. I see myself today as a humanist citizen "belonging" to the world, not primarily a Pakistani or an American. Although, I still love Pakistani people, Pakistani culture and I love my adopted homeland. I have a skepticism towards the dogma, superstition, and irrational beliefs I grew up with, while at the same time I recognize the limitations of the scientific method as "the most reliable way of acquiring knowledge" and find in hermeneutics and phenomenology some indispensable tools for understanding the world. I believe that one of the most important endeavors human beings can engage in is to rise above our belief systems and group ideologies to overcome injustice. And to that, I believe it takes all people “standing in solidarity” with those who are “terrorized,” regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or religion, or tribe.
All this to say, that it is difficult and it takes some work to escape the insidious impacts of our early indoctrination and belongings on our ability to discern "truths" about the world. I stopped believing in TRUTH with a capital T a long time ago. Whether it was the TRUTH about the origins of my country. Or the TRUTH about Mohammad's life. It takes sincerity and self-honesty but it CAN be done. Which is happy news for those of us who have an interest in convincing people to abandon their propaganda-constructed and identity-driven worldviews for reality-based ones, as much as possible.
Sometimes just being patient with someone, showing empathy, treating them how we'd like to be treated, and working to establish things in common to overcome the primitive psychology which screams "we're from a hostile tribe" can accomplish a lot, more than just laying out tons of objective facts disproving their believed narrative about Israel/Palestine or what have you. Although, I'll be the first to admit I have not learned this lesson perfectly!
But at the same time, above all, we can just keep telling the truth (with a small 't'), in as many fresh, engaging and creative and humorous ways as we can come up with. The more we do this, the more opportunities there are for people to catch a glimmer of something beyond the veil of their identity and belonging-installed narratives that reinforce their tribal identities and the cognitive biases which protect it.
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