Reality is different in different locations because reality is formed partially by the ‘genius’ of a place, determined by its population. So there are different ‘bests’ and different ‘truths’ depending on where you are, i.e. who lives around you. This is not to say that there is no truth. It’s that different social phenomena have different effects, different things are ‘healthy’, and there are different metrics of ‘success’.
Any lasting change to a place has to come, not necessarily slowly (policy and government decisions can make immediate changes) but organically – the difference being that it comes from humans who have observed the conditions and bring an idea that only comes ‘from the next location over’.
A hypothetical idea is born in Europe. Let’s say it wouldn’t work in China for some reason – because of environmental conditions, or the way people think, or both. That idea is carried over a mental Silk Road because the people in east Europe interact with the Middle East which interacts with Central Asia. The idea undergoes gradual change as it travels closer to its destination. If it doesn’t change to fit the conditions of the world around it, it dies out before it reaches China. There’s a kind of mental evolution at play where the idea evolves to fit the brains of the carriers, who translate it, make it evolve. It can only get to China in a Chinese-compatible form, i.e. having passed naturally through mediators who make it comprehensible to Chinese people why their neighbours would think it.
Ideas that last can never reach a country from a distant country. They can only come from next door. We call the idea one thing, we track it and say it is consistent, but the truth is, as it has travelled it has dropped and replaced all of its pieces. It’s like a ship of Theseus.
This was the case until the 1990s.
The internet stomps all over the silk road of ideas by allowing us to engage with ideas that are totally foreign and that haven’t undergone any sort of adjustment to fit the way we live. That’s why, even if you don’t live in America, as long as you live in a place influenced by it, you’ll semi-often meet people who have overdosed on American political discourse despite their never having lived there and despite the conditions over there being so different to your own country.
Halloween has never caught on where I live because it’s essentially a downloaded idea, something that’s purely sustained by commercial interests because shops want an excuse to sell chocolates.
You can spot when someone starts reciting a downloaded idea because they immediately become obnoxious and inhuman.
It disconnects them from the things that immediately affect them and it makes it harder for the people around them to understand them. I am reminded of Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou’s idea of the perfect life. To live in a little village, to never need to go anywhere; for your whole life you understand where you are, you know your family, your friends and enemies, your lover. The most you hear of the outside world is the roosters in the next village over.
I recognise the irony of citing distant Chinese philosophy, after saying what I’ve said, and not living too near China. But – as with all ideas – one isn’t supposed to adopt even my idea wholly. In fact, in this case my theory is self-demonstrative – you’re supposed to adapt it to your own circumstances. The life you actually live in conjunction with the people around you is the truth. Not the artificial virtue you gain from learning about remote things.
I’ve seen too many people think of themselves as virtuous when they couldn’t give a toss for anyone around them – but they have abstract sympathy for distant people living in bad conditions. And this makes them a good person. I think that’s nonsense. Such a person has no true sympathy at all. They put all the responsibility for caring about the people around them on others – on therapists, on the State – and they never sacrifice anything, because when a cause is remote, when it only exists online, they get to feel good for participating, for throwing a few coins in the bowl, but that thing never touches their lives.
Now, nobody is wholly like that. Everyone has some threshold at which they will be a good Samaritan in real life. It’s just that the internet makes that much harder because we distract ourselves with the remote, with the general, and ignore the particular, the things we can do here, the soup kitchens at which we can volunteer. To look too far beyond your village is an intelligent and insightful thing to do, but to ignore your surroundings and care only about that which you can’t even touch is a kind of hubris, an almost possessive kind. It’s not particularly helpful most of the time either, in my experience.
verso folio 