The Doodlebugs of Survival

Have you ever seen an intense film suffer at the hands of the audience? An audience that craves for illogical fights and improperly placed songs to a point where the art needs to be compromised for the sake of mass approval.

Have you ever paused to look around at the world at you to spot such vicissitudes? To chuckle at an absurd phenomenon that influences the society transforming them into blind, vacuous individuals who seem to have lost even the last few remains of sanity. Men who seem to be inspired by illogical doctrines that could be deduced to be blasphemous if ever they decided to reflect for just a few seconds more. Have those weird anomalies made you feel better about your own mundane life?

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I know each of you have had the experience of laughing at another soul in a condescending manner frenzied by his or her apparent ignorance.

A supporter of his religion laughs at a caste fanatic for being narrow minded. A supporter of the state ridicules a religious person for being biased. A patriot mocks the state zealot for being possessive about imaginary boundaries within a common mass called a nation. A cosmopolitan cringes at the patriot for hooting the glory of his nation. A scientist laughs at the cosmopolitan for attaching importance to a world which is insignificant in the context of the observable universe.

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The vicious cycle of superciliousness extends to almost all facets of life. Right from the disdain that a feminist displays for a chauvinist to something as trivial as the haughtiness displayed by a Quixote reader when she is faced by a comic reader.

The endless loop to establish superiority always reminds me of the short film, ‘The doodlebug’ by Nolan. The movie is very small in terms of duration and I urge you to watch it immediately. You should ideally stop reading this post and watch the movie, post which you can come back here. In the movie, the protagonist attempts to beat someone who is revealed to be a smaller version of himself. A larger sized protagonist is in the hunt to beat down the former. The string of words I used above would be difficult to comprehend unless you have seen the movie.

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In a way, life too is a constant attempt to prove the superiority of your philosophy as against the philosophy of another man. Life also has a slipper carefully placed over the head of your ideology waiting to crush it with what is believed to be a superior stand point.

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Biology answers the question posed by survival through its actions. The perennial process of evolution which throws up a superior species which is more compatible to the contemporary environment is in itself an answer to our questions. The process says that the cycle may never end even if it results in the extinction of a few species (ideologies in our case). Even if the process has a potential answer at its culmination, the answer seems to be far away from the reach of the present existential observation.

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Also, please let go of any attempts to be superior. Never let any goal be driven by the need to be superior. A desire to earn a 100 billion dollars is a more rational goal than the want to be the richest man. In the vast expanse of the observable universe, an earth is an insignificant speck. Within the speck, the humankind is a smaller concentric circle. Now you can imagine how trivial our struggle for primacy is.

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Author: Hari Haran