Fear of the Light

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light ~ Plato

Honest, sensitive, overpowering. His words leapt off the page and into my mind - etched into lingering anxieties about the immediate future of humanity, and set against the canker that continues to gnaw away at the souls of old empires – real and imagined. 

This particular Facebook comment was posted by a friend in California. A loving family man, smart, a designer of some note. A true visionary. But what struck me was the sense of intense gloom from a human being whom I know to be so unfailingly optimistic about almost everything. 

There’s only one dominant emotion in the world today and that is fear, he said. What’s next is my own fear. What do I say to my boys and their sister? What can I do as a father in a storm this big?  How do I protect them from hate and the growing risk in front of them? 

The despair which triggered such sombre reflections from my friend was the senseless death of George Floyd on a street in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin. 

Today America is fuming with anger. There is a sense of apprehension as people take to the streets and turn on each other yet again. In the past year, 1,014 people have been shot dead by police in America. African Americans are killed at a lopsided rate in comparison to other groups. In most of these cases, the police are not charged with any wrongdoing. 

It is time to face facts. Deeply ingrained racism fuels hatred in this deeply-divided nation. After decades of escalating inequality and conflict, it is clear that racial justice does not exist in what is essentially a police state – one failing to live up to its own self-conceit. This is a nation that still deludedly sees itself as exemplary and exceptional - yet has become nothing more than a playground bully. A physically intimidating brute with the mind of a narcissist and less courage than the fictional lion on Walt Disney's yellow-brick road.

But my rage burns more fiercely than that. Although America’s descent offers us a glimpse of our own fate if we choose not to change some of our most fundamental attitudes, focusing the spotlight purely on the US, or its eccentric President, is a distraction. Which is why my rage reaches past any one nation, beyond the bland coterie of universally-impotent leaders, into the deepest recesses of the human condition we have so casually crafted, and a citizenry lobotomised by money and fear.

I am outraged by the persecution and suppression of people based on the colour of their skin, their gender, or religious beliefs. I am outraged by the apocalyptic terror stalking our world, obliterating the most basic of freedoms to which all human beings should be entitled. I am outraged at the alleged duplicity levelled at countries like China when those screaming their abuse from the rooftops are poisoned by prejudice and ignorance. And I am outraged by any resistance to reform of the defunct neoliberal world-order from an entrenched conjunction of military, financial, surveillance, and corporate elites.

I am also infuriated at the way fear has been weaponized by the media, then seized upon by governments to engender dread in a virus, however deadly it may or may not turn out to be, so that societal control and manipulation is activated with such little effort.

In the worst case I could find of state-endorsed suppression by fear, Indonesian officials are forcing social distancing violators to recite verses from the Koran, stay in "haunted" houses and submit to public shaming on social media. Around 340,000 troops across two dozen cities have been deployed to execute measures aimed at halting transmission of the disease. But provincial leaders are bolstering even these draconian regulations with their own intense crusades. Police in western Bengkulu province, for example, have been forcing offenders to wear placards with pledges to wear masks and keep their distance from others in the future. Images of the wrongdoers were then uploaded to social media to maximise the impact from public shaming. Is this what we have come to as a human family?

In the spring of 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King gave his first major speech on the Vietnam War. In speaking out about the conflict in southeast Asia, the civil rights leader shared his conviction that there comes a time when silence is nothing less than betrayal. So I write this piece motivated by the need to stand up to bullying and obliged to speak out rather than to remain silent. 

Now is the time to ask a fundamental question: How can any leader, indeed how can any person of moral integrity, remain silent when almost every life-critical system in our society is plagued by racial or gender biases - from healthcare to education and philanthropy?

As the COVID-19 panic has us cowering in our homes, avoiding routine physical contact, risking hypoxia from the prolonged wearing of masks, increasingly suspicious of others, of authorities, and fearful of tomorrow, it seems the arc of humanity, so long curving towards greater justice and equality, is suddenly trending in another direction. Optimism is fading. Loneliness, anxiety, domestic violence and depression are rampant. And now rioting and killing. In this social eclipse, will progress towards a more just and equitable world stall?

The greatest fear emanates from those who fear change itself. A yawning chasm has opened up between those who own the means of production and the billions of underprivileged serfs in that system. The present pandemic underscores the many deficiencies endemic within the globalized architecture of human civilization. But there is always hope in the cracks...

Common people see a light on the horizon – a rare chance for a regenerative consciousness to spark change, and greater economic and social justice to take hold. The elite and the rich fear this light. For them, any kind of societal awakening is a risk - which is why they quickly label it communism or a socialist plot that will wreak havoc on everything we cherish. This irrational dread is a sure sign that whatever control they thought they exercised is slipping through their fingers. Amid ideas such as a revitalized commons, cooperative management structures, low-intensity farming, permaculture, non-fiat currencies, peer-to-peer enterprise, zero growth, and decarbonization of the economy, the ruling plutocracy sees only loss and an erosion of their power. Consequently, they are all put in the same basket and brusquely dismissed without the analysis we might normally expect from those in positions of power. 

Not all, but many business owners together with government policymakers, want society to return to normal as quickly as possible. They see COVID-19 as an irritant - a temporary interruption to making money. Most people, however, have glimpsed a reality they assumed long gone: quiet streets, sunny skies in place of smog and clear water in the streams, more time at home with the family, a chance to read a book, take the dogs for a walk on the heath, or potter around the garden. These people do not want to go back to their role as modern-day slaves. They see no reason to return to business-as-usual. Instead, they favor hitting the reset button – though to be fair, they mostly know what they do not want rather than appreciating with any great clarity what a new bright era might mean. 

For the time being, however, they prefer to dream of a saner, less hectic, lifestyle. They are totally open to ditching office routines, the daily commute, traffic jams, pollution, power cuts, the endless drudgery of meaningless work, rampant competition, and arbitrary rules and regulations - all the while trying to keep abreast of the latest fashions and buying stuff they do not actually need. Above all, they want a chance to explore life-affirming pursuits rather than the monotonous, uninterrupted, meaningless slog for material riches. 

So now we have a problem. A problem that goes to the heart of who we are as humans. Those who have done materially well from the way things were in the past are unlikely to have the inclination, the patience, nor the creative imagination, to see any advantage in the alternative reality others of us will welcome with open arms. They want to keep intact the world they knew – a world that brought them comfort and delivered them so much. 

So, there is much work to do if we are to escape the gravitational pull of neo-feudalism and create a bountiful future for more people. We can no longer hide in the intermediate spaces of apathy and silence. We must stand against past inequities - pointing out greed, lies, self-serving policies, and flaws within old systems that no longer serve us all... 

A mindful uprising is required. Peaceful civil disobedience will have to be actioned. At some stage, a revolution might become unavoidable. But first, we can say no to pointless work. We can refuse to buy goods manufactured with child labour. We can end our reliance on plastics, and ban toxic substances. We can stop investing in old smokestack industries. We can revitalize local community life. Why some of us can even grow our own fruit and vegetables. There are so many life-affirming actions we can take with relative ease - as long as we are able to ignore the dominant narrative of desire and consumption.

Naturally, finding viable pathways through our dazed and unstable world will not be easy, particularly while greed and the politics of money continue to define what is important or not, human wellbeing is sacrificed on the altar of economic growth, fewer and fewer of us get to own the means of production, and the mad passion for perpetual war endures. 

Over the past seven or more decades we have been seduced by the incessant demands of an advertising industry claiming to cure all our ills and lead us to happiness. In response, we demanded novelty, watched powerful men indulging in crimes against society, ignored the cries of nature to curb the use of fossil fuels and chemicals, entertained ourselves with social trivia as opposed to engaging with social movements, and turned from the spiritual to the secular.

All that has passed, but only if we want it to be. For those of us that yearn for change, let us speak out. Let us not fear the light as we learned to fear the dark. Instead, let us shatter the silence of complicity. Let us speak with humility, confident in our belief that a better world is achievable. This is our time. Let us act now.