Leave The Web And Change The World
By “the Web,” I mean not just the Internet, but almost all popular media: movies, music, and most of what’s on YouTube and TV. Most of it is made from a place of fear. Not all of it, but most of it. I hope this website is an exception. What’s more, many of the people who make this content have a clear goal: to get you to see the world through fear. They want you to believe the world is a violent, cruel, threatening place you have to defend yourself against, a “dog-eat-dog world.” As a result, we come to believe that suffering is just our lot in life. But if some of us simply stepped back and asked why we are suffering (and very, very few people do), we might be able to spot this fearful way of seeing the world, and simply throw it away.
The problem isn’t only that we consume this content. It’s that we do it without thinking, without asking whether it’s actually good for us or for the world. Does a constant diet of fear, anger, resentment, judgment, guilt, shame, and other dark feelings make us feel better about ourselves? Is it good for the world? We are making struggle seem like a normal part of life, and we keep strengthening the fearful way of seeing the world that we already have. The first and most important step we can take as a society is to recognize that this content is making our lives worse. That’s the key to making better choices from here on.
As far back as history goes, human beings have been at war with each other. It’s always “us” versus “them.” In nearly all of our stories, we quietly accept war as normal: the urge to defend ourselves against some great evil and defeat it. When I first read history as an amateur, I am sorry to say I admired the so-called achievements of Alexander the Great. Thousands, perhaps millions, of lives were disrupted, treated as less than human, and destroyed, simply because those people had the bad luck of being seen as “the other.” Today I see him more accurately, as Alexander the Confused: someone who might be diagnosed today as a psychopath. Like Islamist terrorists today, many of these psychopaths believed violence was an acceptable way to get what they wanted.
I bring up our history because it connects to what we watch and read today. So far, humanity hasn’t learned the obvious lesson of the past: no amount of violence will ever bring peace. We keep thinking in terms of war, though thankfully far less than before. We’ve simply found new enemies. Most of us aren’t killing or conquering anyone. But we still want to crush, dominate, and control others in our minds. You can see this especially in sports, with confused heroes like Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, and Floyd Mayweather, who are worshipped for destroying “the other.” I once admired these men and tried to be like them. Now I see that they can’t truly be happy, because they are obsessed with the empty chase of competing and winning. So the natural next step is to feel sorry for them, not to worship them.
To me, the fact that we hold up these people as role models shows how sick we are as a society. Here’s a simple example. In ancient Rome, gladiators fought to the death in the Colosseum while thousands of people cheered. One gladiator brutally killed another and was loved for it. Back then, the killing happened all at once. Today it still happens, just slowly. Every Sunday, millions of Americans watch hundreds of football players slowly damage their brains. We cheer, we roar, and we’re entertained by this pointless violence. So I ask you: how are the two really different, except in how far they go?
Confused people like Alexander wrongly believed that if they defeated “the other,” there would finally be lasting peace. Get rid of the threat, and the obstacle to peace is gone. But anyone with common sense can see that lasting peace on Earth has never been reached. What we’ve reached instead is constant war. And war doesn’t lead to peace, and never will. It only leads to more war. That same war mindset, born out of fear, constant judgment, and the violence that follows, is what we take in every day: in movies and shows on Netflix, in violent football games on Sunday, and in the endless, shallow judging and comparing on social media.
Almost every movie, TV show, sports event, and violent video game out there tells the same story: a great struggle against an outside enemy, “the good guy versus the bad guy.” Everywhere you look, the same pattern repeats. That pattern, those stories, that drama, is what we need to look at closely. I’m asking you to stop and consider this: maybe the violent, conflict-filled world we live in is simply the story we keep telling ourselves, over and over, without realizing it. And if we want the world to be less violent for everyone, shouldn’t we think about changing the stories we tell ourselves? Wouldn’t the world change as a result? I encourage you to explore this more deeply. By changing what we watch and read, and by leaving most of the fear-driven Web behind, we can change the world around us!