The Revolution of Self-Control
Going from a dark, empty void …
… to carrying the weight of the world could seem like quite a jump, but the truth is you already are creating the world with everything you do and say. Through your associations and everything you post on social media, with every text you send, every meeting you take and every email you write you are altering the universe to some degree.
Ideas spread and take root like viruses, so we are each creating the world in which we live, little by little, act by act and word by word. While it would be impossible to know every time something we said or did changed somebody’s mind or reinforced their prior convictions, it would also be absurd to assume our words and actions don’t have some immediate effect on the people in our various work and social circles.
The concept of people taking greater responsibility for their words and actions — and for holding one another responsible as well — is actually becoming more and more widely held lately. Phrases like “do better” and “be better” have become far more commonplace in just the past handful of years, and the speed at which these expectations have become the norm within a substantial portion of the population is extraordinary. Jokes and behavior that were considered acceptable just a few years ago are completely unacceptable now, and while much of the general public wants to evolve and sees the necessity for this change, this growth, a sizable portion of the public is frightened by it. They resist it loudly, sometimes even violently.
The resistance to this movement has in fact become so large and well-funded, that our news media and social networks are carpet-bombed day and night with anti-democratic, anti-science, even anti-fact rhetoric that loudly denouces the “woke mob” as the people they’re fighting against. They’ve given this movement a derogatory name to use as a rallying cry in their fight against it, and that in and of itself is strong evidence of the existence and power of the movement.
There is more than enough evidence of this social shift that one could reasonably say we’re in the midst of a social revolution. I call it the “Revolution of Self-Control”. The causes of this revolution are numerous, and we’ll talk more about some of them later, but why refer to it as a Revolution of Self-Control?
Let’s start with gun use in the United States, where it is legal in many states to own guns and magazines that serve no purpose except the mass killing of human beings. Gun culture in the US has become so tightly bound to the American identity that by many counts, mass killings have become so commonplace that they’re now going largely unnoticed.
Add to that nuclear weapons and power. With the tools and weapons we’ve created we can destroy our world many times over, and though that’s been true since the advent of nuclear weapons and power half a century ago, the tsunami hitting the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan in 2011 showed the world what could happen when another danger caused by humanity, climate change, collides with the dangers of nuclear power to exponentially increase our potential for self-destruction.
The various ways we’re damaging the planet and environment that give us oxygen and nutrients for basic life is unprecedented to the point that some predict that large sections of the earth will be uninhabitable by humans in just a few decades. Even though the vast majority of scientists have been warning us of the dangers of climate change for decades, and even as their prior predictions continue to come true, we deny it. Despite the fact that all of this information, all of this data and so much analysis by proven reliable sources is accessible to us basically any time we want it, many still deny all of it.
In fact, those who resist dissemination and acceptance of these facts are the same people pushing back on the social revolution. That’s because facts and reality are stubborn. If you believe in science, then you’re likely to believe in history and you’re likely to admit that humanity is the problematic species our history proves us to be. A worthy species for sure, but one that still needs to figure out how to do more healing than hurting.
The need for us all to accept the myriad ways we are hurting one another and ourselves, and to stop doing it, has become as vital to our continued survival as our powers for self-destruction are great. That’s why I call it the Revolution of Self-Control. This revolution is not about pure technological progress as others have been, but about social progress. It’s about accepting that actions have consequences, and to adjust our actions and behavior so that we cause less harm than good. It’s a shame that it requires so much courage to admit what we can see with our own eyes and to accept this change instead of fight against it, but that’s the situation as it stands, and to control one’s society, one must first control oneself.
Having a more nuanced understanding of this revolution and how to navigate it requires an awareness of belief systems in general and how they work. To understand belief systems, you first need to consider the facts and fictions we tell ourselves everyday and to know how to effectively determine which is which, so that’s where we’ll go next.
