I often feel that there’s a lot of us who have put trust in very specific people for a really long time. It was comforting to have the same rotation of faces be the sources of your moral judgment, that there was some welcome continuity between the things that they were teaching you and the actions you were supposed to take.
And I wonder how often there are people out there who don’t even think to go back and question certain sources of information, even when they prove not to be as trustworthy. Worse, when they prove they can’t be trusted at all. We don’t even think to go back and check, what else might we then have to question? Because we’ve just had that steadfast voice in our head that said, “even if the person delivering this information is a hypocrite, I’m going to follow what they say.” There’s still that common creed that you bind yourself to morally.
But which creed is it that you bound yourself to? And who installed it?
Here’s how I think about it: You know pachinko? Those machines where you drop a ball at the top and it bounces off pegs on its way down, landing wherever the pegs direct it? I think our minds work like that when we encounter other people. Stimuli comes in, like you seeing someone new, and the pachinko starts moving through decisions and interactions, possible ways to connect with them.
But here’s the thing: you’ll always have pathways of social interaction that are blocked out to you. Not because you were instructed explicitly not to do something, but because further upstream in that thought process, as you started taking in the information, you had to filter it through the forest of pegs that were installed before that moment. Is this a boy or a girl? Is this a person of a certain age? What race? What nationality? What religion?
Those trusted voices, the ones we listened to for so long, they were installing pegs. They found ways to draw strings between particular pathways, between those pegs, blocking certain routes before you even get there. If those blockages are up at the top of that decision making path, where you’re first interpreting a new person in your environment, you start having different ways of interacting with someone. What could have been an open, accidental, human interaction becomes this intentional, targeted, narrow thing.
The pegs were placed before you had any say in the matter. Whether you wished to prevent connection with others or not.
So, let’s talk about what should be underneath all those pegs. What’s the baseline we should all be able to agree on before the ball even drops?
Whether you think it was Yeshua, or Allah, or creator, or star seeds, or just physics, whatever framework you use, LIFE is still LIFE. Full stop.
No one’s life is worth more or less than any other one individual person’s life. You will only get the one body and the one life. And we’re all sharing that same reality.
At least from a fundamental perspective, that should be the basis for why people inherently have value. That your life has value, just like their life has value. Because what if everybody literally just looked around and said:
“I see you. You are also alive. And that’s holy, just like my life. That’s sacred, just like my life. You are living in this same shared reality with the same constraints. A single lifetime, in a single body, to explore an incredibly vast and beautiful and diverse and interesting universe. Together.”
That’s the one thing we all know for certain we were given, regardless of who or what you think gave it. The one life. That should be the foundation. That’s what the ball should land on if nothing blocks it.
But that’s not what happens, is it?
We look at each other through the lens of what national allegiances someone has. Who are they a citizen of? As if that’s inherently going to make me a more important human being than the person next to me.
We don’t see our neighbors. We see labels. Ways that we’ve tried to turn groups into words so that it makes our tired, lazy little brains not have to work so hard. “Because, it’s so hard to have to think about what the full scope of someone else’s life might be like. Oh, my goodness gracious. No, that’s a little too difficult for me.”
Those are the pegs at work. The blockages of language, of division. We don’t have all the options available to us, let alone all the healthy options available. Because some of them have gotten blocked off so early in that thought process. The stimuli comes in and the pachinko starts moving, but it’s blocked before it can even get to “this is my neighbor” or “this is another person living their one life.”
And that’s a real tragedy.
Because some of those trusted voices? They’re not just installing pegs that narrow our options. They’re installing pegs designed to block the most fundamental pathway entirely, the one that leads to recognizing another person’s life as equivalent to your own.
When someone comes along and says some awful things, tells you that other people need to die about it, that’s not just bad information, that’s a peg placed so high up in the machine that everything downstream gets blocked. Their understanding of another living person misaligned, poisoned.
The foundation of your argument hinges on one race being superior to another? Absolutely not.
You say that you’re reading the same Bible as all those Christians that didn’t have beef with each other before you? You’re that bent out of shape about there being people of a different nationality, melanated differently than you, and they have to die about it? Their lives are forfeit because they’ve encroached on your real estate?
Go #@&% yourself. That’s not how to view your neighbor.
Because when those beliefs leech out into the world in such a way that other people’s lives are made worse, just because of a belief that someone else has given you, you’re denying that person of the only thing that we all know for certain was given to us: that one LIFE.
So what do we do about it?
It has to be an agreement that the rest of us make. Much like the social contract: if someone does decide that they’re going to make their voice say that other people need to die, you don’t give them any power. You don’t give them the opportunity to sow the seeds of hatred into other people’s minds, to contort them, to offer solutions to some problems along with the baggage of an incredibly hateful perspective on everyone else that’s also alive.
We can’t abide it. We have to see those seeds being planted, those pegs and barriers being installed, and say no. That’s not acceptable. We need to make sure that those aren’t people others follow, we do that by not giving them space in the public square.
To be clear, this isn’t about silencing ideas. It’s about recognizing that certain voices are actively trying to install pegs that block human recognition at the highest level. And if we let them, they’ll keep installing those blockages in more and more minds until the pathway to “this is my neighbor, living their one life” is blocked off entirely.
Because here’s what’s possible when those pathways aren’t blocked:
We could work together as an entire, single, united species. We could find out the deepest secrets of the universe that we are capable of understanding. We can lay a path forward for an understood world that’s sustainable for anyone that lives with us and those that come after us.
I mean, look at what we’ve already done! Our science, our technology, it’s been incredible! People are living longer, healthier lives than ever before in human history!
It’s almost like when you stop having barriers between each other, when those damn pegs don’t block collaboration, you get to see what’s actually possible, unburdened by the barriers within our own minds.
We all have this one planet to live on. Together. And we can achieve such incredible things if we put our minds to it.
So, choose wisely who you’re going to listen to. Audit the pegs they’ve installed. Interrogate your own barriers to others, how you limit interactions and who taught you that behavior.
Be chill to your neighbors. Remember: everyone is your neighbor. We are all living in one giant shared neighborhood, whether we draw lines in the sand to pretend that we’re separated from each other or not.
Each of us only has one life.
Do better whenever you can.
Anyway, just some thoughts I’ve been mulling over for a while. Went on a rant about this over the weekend, watching the state of the world after such a tumultuous year, and decided to change things up. I’ll go back to fiction and prose, just wanted to get this out there.
Mike Lightheart 