Sometimes we feel that we’ve had enough and it’s time to make a revolution: change the environment and society. But it is not the same this time around. This time it is about evolution rather than revolution.
We have been living in societies for thousands of years and had a social life because we were unable to provide everything we needed on our own. In fact, everyone wants a better life for himself, confident and peaceful. Everyone wants to be more successful than others. Envy and ambition rule, and push us to develop.
Yet, while a person develops within society, his personal life changes through the society. One depends on the other. Today we depend on thousands of people around the world because of what we wear, eat, and generally consume; there is no country which did not participate in providing us with everything we have.
And when it does not happen directly, it happens through another several countries: one country supplies materials, another supplies machine parts, and another produces the goods we buy. Studies show that everyone in the world depends on everyone else. And in order for us to live well, we have to make sure that everybody around us also lives well, be it a neighbor’s family or another country.
This is a wonderfully poignant video.
The direct story is even true. I have learned this principle the hard way in trying to route out dandylions from my own lawn to find out how crucial it is that my neighbors’s lawns are protected too!
However the true depth is in the meaning of the allegory. We are as integrated and delicate as a deck of cards, and if neighbors in our communities of individuals fall, or in our community of nations, the reverberations will be both unstoppable and catastrophic. There is now one rug underneath us all, and it better not get pulled out from anybody!
You know what, this post of yours got me thinking: there are many invisible micro-influences that amount to very real macro-consequences.
You never see the corn pollen doing its work, yet its quality has very real effects on the crops. Among people, a type of “invisible micro-influence” that people can study is, say, a flu virus, and scientists can trace the systematic path it takes within communities, even though, like pollen, in our everyday life we can’t see it unravel in action directly, only after we encounter the consequences of runny noses. 🙂
And taking that as a reference point, we can even say that we have even more intangible invisible influences in form of our emotional effect on each other. An example most people can relate to: Someone can be driving to work on a beautiful sunny morning, purring along to some favorite tune on the radio, and then another driver cuts him off, making some angry gestures, and suddenly that person’s mood is ruined. And he can become grumpy and feel like the world is out to get him and start preemptively defending himself against the injustice of this cruel world by becoming an angry and aggressive driver himself. And through that, he spreads the invisible contagion to other people who were otherwise happily enjoying their sunny drive, and now you have many people carrying that grumpiness or defensiveness into the workplace, family, onto their kids, and so on – without even realizing it. 🙁 I bet if we could actually study this in the same way that we study the spread of pollen and viruses, we’d see that we can spread positive and negative contagions that affect the “mental health” of a community same as physical health. And just like if I cough without covering my mouth and infect someone next to me, and that person infects others, a month later, this can come full circle and get me sick all over again – and I would have absolutely no idea that I was the one that ultimately set this chain of events in motion and essentially did this to myself. Maybe the inner emotional “illness” spreads the same way? And maybe that someone who cut me off this morning did that because a month ago I unwittingly unleashed an emotional “virus” that spread and come full circle? Like good or bad pollen, like germs (or lack thereof), and so it is with our good or ill will towards each other?
And if it works like that on a small scale, then you are totally right, because everything is so interconnected, it surely scales-up to country-wide and inter-country effects too. That’s a sobering thought…
Thank you, again, for your thought-provoking articles and videos!
Thank you for this video!!! I’ve watched it a few times and it made me smile every time. And so true – how can anyone argue with that?! 🙂