Sanity Is Impossibility by Santosh Jha (books to read in a lifetime txt) 📕

This design for associations installed in human behavior and action, a subconscious rigidity and dogmatism for ‘Identities’. This resulted into creation of tribes and reactionary tribal loyalty for the identity. Therefore, human history has been a sordid and bloody saga of wars between different tribes and identities. Modern scientists warn that this tribal instinct is still very much alive and kicking in modern human and human world. In fact, the new millennium of 21st century has witnessed the revival of identity instincts and contemporary global crisis has this very powerful degenerative and regressive reversal to ‘ethnicity’ conflict and cooperation, pushing the world into another crisis. The two calamitous world wars of humanity also had their seeds in this tribal instinct of identity.

This identity instinct and ethnicity-loyalty is singular major insanity-point for average man and woman at individual and personal level too. As we have talked earlier, humanity has come a long way since 4 million years back, when our tribal instincts ruled us and made life-living succeed. This age-old instinct is now regressive and degenerative. This primary ‘intelligence’ of 4 million years back is singular calamitous ‘stupidity’ in 21st century world. Our regressive and degenerative tribal instinct of rigidity and dogmatism of ‘Identity’ is surely leading us to extinction. This is evident and overly manifested everywhere – society, culture, politics, economy, markets and even family relationships. This is the biggest ‘unlearning’ challenge for humanity.

However, as we have talked in detail earlier, humanity at collective levels have always been blind to these realities and remain so. Earlier humanity could probably be forgiven for pushing fellow humans into miseries of war and distress as they were not aware of the scientific facts about human nature and functioning of human mind consciousness. However, contemporary humanity cannot be pardoned for continuing to ape and even augment the same age-old regressive and degenerative stupidities and insanities. But the fact remains that given the attitude of contemporary societal, cultural and political leadership and the complex state of international economics, it seems impossible that sanity can ever have any possibility in modern world. Therefore, sanity is possible only at personal levels and individualistic domain.

So, we have a clear and singular model of personal sanity, which an individual can follow and practice to engender, install and sustain sanity in his or her life-living. Let us now fill in the details of this model of personal sanity by narrating and inculcating the cognitive change an individual needs to install in his or her consciousness.

It is human design and also innate need to connect with all elements outside in the milieus. The very innate process of association building is for the crucial need to express one’s connect with all elements within and outside, as a child grows into adulthood. In broad terms an individual’s journey to maturity requires this essential liberty to establish association and connect with all elements in the milieus to express his personality, feelings, beliefs and perspectives. Liberty means this freedom of every person to express himself or herself.

However, we know that this liberty is a contextual reality. It is because, an individual’s growth and evolving into adulthood happens in society, culture and a political-economic system. Liberty of an individual therefore is contextual to society and other collectivities and it means, an individual’s liberty is always conditional to some reasonable restrictions and authoritative collective norms and rules. Naturally, liberty of a person, the rights of an individual to grow in expression of his or her associations and connects with elements in milieus are always competitive and restrictive. This creates a struggle, which in turn encourages reactionary and instinctive energies, leading to augmented probabilities of hypocrisies and insanity.

It is a precarious dualism, which needs to be resolved for personal sanity. An individual’s expression of his or her ‘I’ or self is meaningful and of a utility and worth only when it is associated and connected with collective spaces like society, culture, markets, nations, etc where billions of other individuals are out vying for the same. It has no meaning if a person opts to leave human world and live in a jungle alone. He or she has 100 percent liberty and zero percent competition but also no association and connect. This happens only in human world of society and cultures. An individual has meaning, utility and worth only in collective spaces and all his or her troubles and conflicts also come from this same realism.

A person needs collective spaces for growth, evolving and validation of ‘I’ or self and this itself stands out as most powerful causality of most of his or her 3Cs – Conflicts, Chaos and Confusion. An individual shall keep struggling for his or her liberty and freedom to have his or her own way of shaping reality for his or her life-living and as there shall always be many times more people already, vying fiercely to have their own respective liberties to prevail, struggling to install their own or even antagonistic realities. This causality of struggle and battle for liberties instigate the animalistic tribal instincts in humans and in turn unleash huge loads of stress and conflicts. This is perfect causality for impossibility of sanity.

It is only natural and amply clear that personal sanity can be attained only when an individual comes out of this causality – this dualistic contextuality and relativism between individual and society. Does this mean that a person shall have to abandon all his liberties in favor of society? No, certainly not. All he or she has to do is to accept the holism, understand and accept this dualism and suitably condition his consciousness towards this contextual reality. As a person sees and understands this causality between him or her and the collective spaces, he or she shall not fall in the trap of reactionary and instinctive anger and frustration. Rather, he or she shall grow more receptive, skillful and objectively accustomed to the inbuilt conflict. He or she shall become more compassionate towards others and that alone has the potential to install lasting sanity.

This is what we have to do for personal sanity. We have two ways out of this trap of duality –

First step is to ‘unlearn’ this insistence of seeking expression of liberty in calamitously competitive collective spaces and instead, learn the artistry of expression and communication of ‘I’ or self in personal and other non-competitive space.

Secondly and more importantly, allow the intelligence of holism to paint one’s consciousness and this shall ensure that an individual’s expression of liberty in collective spaces is more compassionate and less passionate. There is no need to curtail or abandon any of one’s liberty and freedom. All we have to do is to change the cognition and do it with a compassionate consciousness, understanding and accepting that the collective spaces are too heavily crowded and liberties are constricted for expression. This cognitive change of acceptance of individual liberty with more compassion and lessened passion shall lead to larger sanity prospect.

It has to be admitted here that this all may seem easy at theoretical level but hugely tough to practice. It is primarily because an adult has had this populist and prolonged mind-training to be ‘passionate’ about his life goals and be ‘intuitively crafty’ in facing competition head on and maneuver his or her way out of the crowd to shine alone as a pole star. This is basic and bare hypocrisy that humans relish and then expect sanity, system and order in the society! How?

It is because an individual needs the collective spaces for his or her very growth and journey to adulthood. It is in society and culture that he or she finds meaning and validity of his or her liberty. A child cannot reach to happy and poised adulthood if society as a whole is not compassionate about his or her individual liberties. However, when an individual grows to adulthood, he or she passionately manipulates this very society and culture to seek individualistic and personal attainments and expression of his or her ‘I’ or self. If the adult is not paying back to society in the same compassion-coin, it is biggest hypocrisy and definitive road to insanity.

In passion driven milieus, the situation has gone worse. It is this passionate individualism that has created this contemporary calamitous reality of ‘5 Percent’ having income and wealth more than that of the rest of ‘95 Percent’. The compassion-deficit society and cultures have become so competitive and individualistically so rigid and dogmatic about passionate individual goals and attainments of life that a growing up child is not getting the desirable compassion from the collective space at the first instance. This itself infuses conflict and competitiveness in an adult. It is only natural that this compassion-deficit adult shall not be innately inclined to pay any amount of compassion back into the system of collective spaces. This shall augment and embolden the cyclicality of causality of more brutal and passion-driven competitiveness and conflict in human world as well as in individuals. This is perfect recipe for hypocrisies and insanity. This we have to come out of, if we wish to extend any reasonable chance to personal sanity in contemporary world.

The first step of course is to understand this causality of conflict between individual and society and other collective spaces and design small but compassionate steps to stay away from this passion-driven reactionary and hypocritical causality. Secondly, an individual has to look for a probable pattern of interaction with collective spaces, which allows less competitive field of operation to personal liberty. Thirdly, an individual also has to make suitable enterprise to seek utility and value in such self-expressions which are more internal and personal, not requiring validation from collective spaces. It may seem tough but only because we see and accept things from our current and contemporary mind training and cognition. There are enough such spaces and many young people are already into it. All it may take is compassionate acceptance of alternative cognition of utilities, value and worth of other non-conventional and non-conformist parts of Reality, which constitute the holism of worldview.

For example, we all know how in the last 60-70 years, there has been a mad rush of people towards urban spaces from rural landscapes. In popular perception, good life has come to be solely associated with urban and metropolis living. There is a decisive movement of people towards cities and it has created such complexities and competitiveness in urban life-living, which is becoming seed content of most chaos and conflicts in average life-living. It is such a tragedy that average person does not understand that even while in popular perception it may seem that the world lives in town and cities, the reality is that the entire urban landscape is only less than one percent of the total global land. The trouble is that this less than one percent urban land accommodates over 54 percent of global population.

On the other hand, rural lands with different farming and non-farming potentials occupy around 40 percent of global land but homes only less than 50 percent of global population. Then, there are forest lands that occupy 30 percent of global land but even small tribal population in forested regions are being fast removed. The scary detail, which is so apparent yet neglected by most of us is that things were not in such a mess only a century back. Humanity was primarily a rural living reality with urbanized living less than 10 percent. In the second half of 20th century, humanity created its own trouble by clustering most economic activities and facilities in handful of urban centers. That was probably not enough of a stupidity so, humanity ensured that rural areas got gradually neglected and dilapidated so that urban life-living could get cheap labor force.

The contemporary human life-living is in such disaster that globally,