The Abundance of Deceit

I increasingly feel that having any social consciousness is a drawback. It pulls down your chances of succeeding in professional, artistic and even social spheres themselves. Because society itself is based on collective lies that we have agreed to believe. The biggest; of course, being equality.

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In a post climate change and post Gaza genocide world, it is clear that even lip service to the collective good is no longer required. A million trees are being cut on the Great Nicobar Island and an entire state of the country had been at war for over a year but we continued to discuss a billionaire’s wedding and the latest banger synthesised on auto-tune.

The first step towards understanding this horrific apathy is that it has always been this way. That those in power across the world have historically almost invariably worked actively against the interest of their people. That is how they got to power in the first place. The last step is seeing the same monster in your own mirror. The same educated people who post the most pretentious BS on LinkedIn eventually vote for the most depraved politicians on the ballot. At least the poor voting for freebies or even merely alcohol are being objective.

Ministries of information actively foster misinformation. Ministries of labor ensure workers’ rights don’t get in the way of capital. Ministries of environment ensure conservation does not slow down lucrative mining and infrastructure projects. All media is designed to subvert, manipulate or outright mislead. The ones who aren’t compromised are co-opted eventually if not silenced by coercion. The food that is sold to you is only edible at best. What drugs are legal and what drugs are not seems to be based only on revenue. The houses we struggle to buy are inflated before they even go on sale. The banks you trust your hard-earned money with write off the biggest loans with the wave of a hand or simply a call from the capital. The hospitals and doctors your trust with your health and your life are often incentivised to the contrary. All products are now built not to last adding to already runaway inflation and pollution. The meat, fish and poultry we eat is produced through unfathomable cruelty and at great cost to the environment only for us to waste 1/3rd of it. Budgets are always a constraint for the most critical of causes including climate change but defence remains by far the biggest industry. We spend more than ten times the amount it would take to feed and care for everyone in the world on weapons that can kill this entire population many times over. That; in one stat, is the world we live in.

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You try to find answers in religion but its gatekeepers keep you engaged in only rituals and superstitions. You still find solace in friends and family but they are going through the same stressors as you and only rarely are you able to connect with them as a person and not a character they are supposed to play to engage yours. The state only wants taxes out of you and religion only wants compliance. Once they have extracted these resources, you are on your own.

Deceit is not an event or an avoidable tragedy, it is the very milieu we live in. From job interviews to property disputes to domestic abuse, lying and gas lighting is the norm. In out most personal and intimate relationships we seldom speak our minds. The conversations we need to have the most have been pending the longest. Most social and personal norms we live by are impositions through conditioning. They may make some aggregate collective sense but are often at odds with an individual’s desires and tendencies. From that lens, the fact that half of all serious crimes from theft to rape to murder are committed by family members is not as surprising. And as a side note, the rate of infidelity is often estimated to be over 50%. The same odds multiplied a billion fold give you the hot, flat and doomed world we living in.

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There was always misinformation, there was always fake news, superstition, bigotry, backstabbing, politics and conspiracy. Just that the history that survives is always written by the victors who were invariably the more ruthless and it reaches us through a thousand Chinese whispers. If anything, all the lies and deceits are being documented now because of the internet. The genocide still continues but at least now many writers and survivors have a voice. The rise of totalitarianism around the world is more a paranoid response to these billion new voices than some slow repeating cycle of history. What the liberal parties were doing behind closed doors the conservatives now do on live television. More than 50,000 civilians get murdered in cold blood including women and children and we are still debating the scientific/legal/official definition of a genocide. The only consolation is that it was all recorded unlike the countless massacres of our glorious history. That is; sadly, the best one can hope for: documentation. Even in the mythical long arc of history power seems to be winning over kindness. The least one can do is call it out. Let the dictator not have the satisfaction of passing off as a benevolent leader while pursuing his sins with impunity.

All these years I thought if only there was more evidence, more coverage, more awareness, people would know, they would understand, they would be outraged. But that’s not the case. Every murder and every rape that gets reported seems to make it that much more easier for the next one to be ignored. Every scam that is revealed makes the next bailout more inevitable. Every act of brutality makes the next act of kindness seem more naive. It confirms our hopelessness and our deepest fear that kindness is indeed a sign of weakness. People who still fight the good fight are therefore the most hopeful people in the world. But instead we brush them off as pessimists and trouble-makers.

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But such people seem fewer and far in between by the year. The revolution never came because perhaps we identify more with the oppressors than the victims. Till it is us our turn to be the victims, for others to simply watch and swipe away on their screens as one more banal piece of content. We see the system is broken, we see the glaciers are melting, we see that we are being lied to on our face but we also identify with the deceit. We would have done the same if we were in their place. Get real. Be practical. There is no other way. We don’t live in an ideal world. The world is not fair. And other such lazy excuses.

The arguments about capitalism v/s communism and free market v/s socialism will continue. But reality is somewhere in the middle. The most rabidly capitalist of countries including our own employ a lot of socialist principles to keep their heads above the water. In letter at least if not in practice, India provides ration to 80 crore of its citizens. A fact that is advertised as garlic to the Dracula of Biblical levels of income disparity in the country. The idea seems to be to feed the population just enough to keep them alive and coherent enough to get their vote.

By the time the next market crisis hits and another set of bailouts are announced, a new global system of techno feudalism is predicted to set in. Going by the grip social media has on our lives and its influence on real world events, this new age may have already set in. But it won’t be a neon utopia. Only the mould of psychopaths who hold power changes. What system or model is currently subverting reality remains an academic pursuit or worse, a hot take on another tech bro podcast. It is only poetic that our own doom gets sold to us as engaging content.

If a person does manage to jump through all the hoops, see through all the deceits, realise the inevitability of the suffering we go through ourselves and impose on others and still manages to harbour some empathy for those less fortunate, he is labelled a pessimist — the highest sin in a market that can only survive on infinite growth. Cheer up. Look on the bright side. Market itself will solve the problem. There is no such thing as ‘enough success’ in Adam Smith’s world. But if you do manage to reach a plane of relative worldly success that is ahead of inflation and even enough for a rainy day, a feeling of hollowness sets in. Of having won in a game that was rigged form the beginning. And why is winning even the criteria?

It’s not because we are genetically coded to be fatally competitive but because our education is vocational at best and propaganda at worst. Educated folk often seem more cruel and cynical than the uneducated. Blissfully unaware of the class and caste system they are continuing beneficiaries of. We worship rivers and women in scripture while treating them as badly as possible in real life, seemingly without any cognitive dissonance. I therefore think that true education is how much reality the mind can endure without going insane. That, is true dignity. To be able to see the world with all its deceptions and brutality and still refuse to get your hands dirty.

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And it begins with realising that most desires are not ours, not natural but imposed by the authorities and the market they foster. That most of your behaviour, your likes and dislikes, your dreams and prejudices and even your goals and fears are implanted. Ignorance is not really bliss because a life spent sleep-walking is not really a life at all. Knowledge feels like a burden only because you are new to it. As all the masks fall off, a lightness sets in. Lightness of not participating in the drama, not reacting to provocations and not wanting more of everything. Fewer your wants, fewer your compromises and lesser your proclivity to the deceptions that keep the economy going. Until one day you find worth with within yourself and not in any titles, including the benevolent ones.

The final mask to fall off would be that of the reformer. Seeing through the drama and assumptions of the mind of the saviour too. Once you get past this stage, you can be the buoy that does not stop the storm but it keeps floating even in an ocean of deception for it is the only thing it can naturally do.

• Punit Pania