the cancer of the overgrown self

we’re all in it together

said Mr David Cameron a while ago, tainting the otherwise unquestionably profound truth with the stench of the selfish political agenda. and he was right, no matter how twisted mind tries to twist it into its own resemblance—the truth doesn’t get any less truer because it was ill-appropriated.

because we—indeed—are in it together and what we all, collectively, suffer from, is the cancer of the overgrown individuality-, profit-, self-obsessed ego, fixated on the accumulation of wealth and prolonging existence at all cost, against the entropy and the quantum, fluid principles of the non-dualistic nature coming as a seemingly solid, material and permanent, change-averse manifestation of it.

argue all you like—uncomfortable as the realisation may come, especially if your life, or business model, has been built around the notion of the exclusionist individualism and competition—but it’s not my opinion. the Buddha, the Dalai Lama, the hermetic philosophy, Plato, Jesus of the Bible and the non-canonical, apocryphal gospels, Jiddu Krishnamurti, the native people of the world conquered by the binarily-minded Europeans, quantum physics, sociology or just plain common sense—you name it—all say so.

and i don’t know, maybe it’s because i was born and raised in a communist country, where and when the sense of collective—often, sadly, more than individual—responsibility and connection against the common enemy of the systemic oppressor was deeply rooted, maybe it’s because the environment i’ve?sprouted and grown out of was saturated with the deeply nature-rooted Buddhist mindset that trickled onto the—by definition—non-dogmatic interpretation of then universally adopted Catholic dogma, maybe because i work as a multimedia designer for a tax-payer-funded, public sector organisation having the said public’s well-being—in an individual and collective sense—at least theoretically—as a core of the mission and the very raison d'être, maybe because i’m a parent, an educator by education, or maybe just—most likely—it’s the resultant of all of it and many more, but—whether i like it or not—i tend to compulsively care and feel responsible for the quality, the meaning and the attention vector of the work i deliver.

mostly, on a daily basis, i do infographics, data visualisations and visual communication strongly based on the health-related statistical data, like the one below, and to do it—in my view—honestly, unlike many designers working for commercially-focused endeavours who, to eliminate the inconvenient cognitive dissonance, cut the personal responsibility out of their individual input, the input too often of scarily high—one has to admit—quality and thus of worryingly effective, subliminal nature—i feel the obligation to engage with the content. and to say it—the content—is worrying, is a gross understatement. it also feeds—in me at least—the need of reflection.

and the unavoidable reflection is that we live in the now globally cancerous matrix of a power- and self-importance-confirmation-hungry self-perpetuating corporate mindset, with the cancer reference being quite literal at that, too—as this is not merely a figure of speech. you see, the likes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, the Koch brothers, Harvey Weinstein, the Kardashians, Kanye and all the resource-, accumulation- and immortality-obsessed celebrity wannabes, behave exactly like the cancerous growth. exactly, as the mechanics of it are exactly the same—a healthy individual cell in the body—a physical one or that of a community, a tribe, a nation or humanity as a whole—has its place and a specific role defined and optimised for not only its individual benefit but that of the entire organism as much. only when its natural functions are corrupted and damaged by the overexposure to energy, like when we excessively consume sugar, the Sun’s energy in the purest chemical form, or sunbathe without the proper consideration for the electromagnetic radiation we’re made of, or when we are excessively remunerated for our input, inadequately on the energy-exchange level to the actual contribution, does it begin to ponder upon the notion of immortality and infinite growth. and if it’s influential enough, for whatever reason, that notion spreads uncontrollably in the compromised and weakened environment, be it an organ, a culture, an enterprise?or a nation.

no matter how intensely the background divide-and-conquer narrative tries to convince us otherwise, sinisterly offering us instantaneously applicable, sweet and convenient pills to numb the instinctive search for wider and deeper meaning, to discourage delaying gratification and to feed the illusion of self-importance, we are social creatures. we are cells of a body, leaves on a tree—all cooperating for the large-scale benefit of the collective and all the individual aspects, and constituent parts, of it. the whole is more than the collection of its parts, Gestalt says, and this design, or actually music-originated psychological principle applies all across the scale. fearful and uncertain, lead by the dead-memory burdened head, the literal or the governmental, preoccupied with the self-preservation activity, the head who—often aggressively—assumed superiority over the rest of the organism, we’ve fallen into the steep-walled hole of the ill-founded belief in the individually-focused ‘do what’s best for you’ paradigm, whereas in reality we don’t even have, contrary to the commonly prevalent and a very—indeed—convincing illusion, an individual mind, as the mind you have is the result of all the social interconnectedness we all float suspended in, together with all the aspects of reality we deemed irrelevant on the basis of human-centric perspective limited by the sensory equipment.

in the—relatively to our evolutionary age—not so distant past, the worst punishment an individual who committed a crime of the socially most abhorrent nature was subject to was exile, expulsion from the community, ostracism. while lacking the immediacy, it meant the most painful and feared manner of departing from the material world, far worse than instant death: the gradual weakening of mental and physical immunity by the elevated levels of stress hormones and chronic stress coming from the lack of life-supporting feedback that lead to slow decomposition of the sense of security, belonging, identity, and—ultimately—physical death.

not convinced, are you? well, who am i—a weirdly talking stranger—an arrogant self-proclaimed bodhisattva—to earn your trust just like this, right? please don’t, by no means, take my biased word for it—if you’re still with me, here’s some wider perspective, and from those who, unlike me, professionally, and with a degree of authority i may never achieve (even if i deluded myself into thinking i can or should), focus on the matter:

Anthropological Aspects of Ostracism by Patrik S?derberg and Douglas P. Fry: https://hhs.uncg.edu/pcs/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2019/11/2017-Soderberg-Fry-Anthropological-Aspects-of-Ostracism-ch.17.pdf

Ubuntu: I Am Because We Are by ?Pamela Ayo Yetunde, Rehena Harilall, Nobantu Mpotulo, David W. Robinson-Morris And Yao Obiora Dibia: https://www.lionsroar.com/ubuntu-i-am-because-we-are/

Why You Should Think With Your Environment, Not Just Your Mind by Clay Skipper: https://www.gq.com/story/extended-mind-annie-murphy-paul

The Problem With Individualism by Alain de Botton: https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/the-problem-with-individualism/

Is Your 'Self' Just an Illusion? by Robert Lawrence Kuhn: https://www.livescience.com/55999-is-your-self-just-an-illusion.html

The 'me' illusion: How your brain conjures up your sense of self by Sofia Deleniv: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23931940-100-the-me-illusion-how-your-brain-conjures-up-your-sense-of-self/

Why You Don’t (and Can’t) Think Alone by Jag Bhalla: https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/why-you-dont-and-cant-think-alone/

Science and Buddhism agree: There is no “you” there by Lori Chandler: https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/good-news-science-buddha-agree-theres-no-you/

Leading neuroscientists and Buddhists agree: “Consciousness is everywhere” by Sam Littlefair: https://www.lionsroar.com/christof-koch-unites-buddhist-neuroscience-universal-nature-mind/

You are a network by Kathleen Wallace: https://aeon.co/essays/the-self-is-not-singular-but-a-fluid-network-of-identities

The Illusion of the Self by Sam Woolfe: https://philosophynow.org/issues/97/The_Illusion_of_the_Self

Scientists studying psychoactive drugs accidentally proved the self is an illusion by Ephrat Livni: https://qz.com/1196408/scientists-studying-psilocybin-accidentally-proved-the-self-is-an-illusion/

Is Christianity Individualistic or Collectivist? “Yes” by C.S. Lewis and J. Gresham Machen: https://derekzrishmawy.com/2013/01/03/is-christianity-individualistic-or-collectivist-yes-c-s-lewis-and-j-gresham-machen/

It’s Immoral. It’s Unethical. It’s Torture. by Spencer Woodman: https://www.icij.org/investigations/solitary-voices/solitary-confinement-its-immoral-its-unethical-its-torture/

What are the effects of solitary confinement on health? by Jayne Leonard: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/solitary-confinement-effects

Law & Neuroscience: The Case of Solitary Confinement by Jules Lobel and?Huda Akil: https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/147/4/61/27222/Law-amp-Neuroscience-The-Case-of-Solitary

Socially isolated people have differently wired brains and poorer cognition–new?research by Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, Christelle Langley, Chun Shen and Jianfeng Feng: https://theconversation.com/socially-isolated-people-have-differently-wired-brains-and-poorer-cognition-new-research-185150

What Happens in the Brain When People Make Music Together? by Neuroscience News: https://neurosciencenews.com/music-collaberation-brain-18607/

Indra’s Net by Phil Servedio: https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/article/the-indras-net

we are all in it together. as people greet one another in the Shona language:

“Mhoro, wakaadii” (“Hello, how are you?”) “Ndapora kana wapora” (“I am well if you are well”)