Hi,
Last week, I wrote a review of Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens’. It was as kind as I could make it, given that my overall feeling was that the book is an interesting take on a boring trope. Still, I learned many things reading it, including the lesson that a 400-page book isn’t the best idea when you have a tight turnaround time in which to produce a review.
My main takeaway from Harari’s work is that humans believe many things to be true, not because those things are objectively true but because we have decided that they must be. Harari describes this phenomenon as ‘intersubjectivity’, a term for the collective delusions which sustain our societies because millions if not billions of us have faith in them.
In today’s world, we believe that numerous social constructs are so essential to human life that we’ve completely forgotten how humans once lived quite successfully without them. Borders, for instance, are just one example. Harari writes that humans developed money, capitalism and even human rights through collective agreements and shared practices which over time have produced material realities. Ultimately, when enough of us believe that we can’t live without something, it becomes real — and eventually ‘normal’.
I don’t like the word ‘normal’. This could be because I’ve spent most of my life outside its confines. Regardless of my personal experience, ‘normalcy’ is generally a violent construct in the modern world. It’s enforced by stripping those people who don’t fit within its diktats of their full humanity. We protect normalcy by insisting on specific realities, then delegitimising everything outside — even when that results in great suffering or death.
It’s now normal, almost everywhere in the world, to have agents, paid with people’s money collected as taxes, to protect property and state power even at the expense of the people who pay their salaries. We call them the police, gendarmes, military, etc. It’s now normal, almost everywhere in the world, to believe in a hierarchy of humanity that places women below men, and queer and/or trans folks even lower.
It’s ‘normal’ to gain power through exploitation, domination and oppression. All these ‘normal’ realities have been with us at least for a couple of hundred years. Since most people live no longer than 80-odd years, most of us are unable to imagine the world without them.
Consequently, people insist that it’s ‘crazy’ to call for the abolition of police, despite the fact that police generally don’t do what they claim they exist to do, and instead commit violence against poor, black, or otherwise disempowered people.
People insist that it’s ‘crazy’ to call for the abolition of legal marriage, even though life-long commitment can exist outside of it, and legal marriage has institutionalised harmful ideologies like sexism, queerphobia, and legislative control of private sexual activity.
People insist that it’s ‘crazy’ to abolish landlords and private property, even though we’ve seen how capitalism has resulted in the simultaneous reality of millions of empty homes and millions of homeless people.
Crazy. People even insist on their right to use ableist language like ‘crazy’ to describe things they disagree with or find unbelievable. Even when we understand that this sort of language further stigmatises mentally ill people.
But none of this is ‘crazy’. It’s just different.
All of these demands for abolition and social transformation come from the same place that has sustained human life for millennia: our imagination. Humans have only survived this long because of our ability to imagine things that don’t yet exist. And by getting enough people to imagine along with us.
As clichéd as this may sound, literally anything is possible—as long as we can imagine it.
Better still, these realities exist. There’s almost none which can’t be found somewhere in the world. No matter how outlandish we might find an idea, there is a place on Earth—right now—where it’s probably happening. Places where there are no militarised police, no homeless people, no tangible state interference in love and sex, no vilification of the mentally ill.
There may not be any single place where all of these things are true at once, but there are places where at least some of them are true.
Many of us might think of such places as backwards. But perhaps they’re not. Perhaps they just have the ability to imagine and produce different realities; less harmful, more humane. Perhaps they were just lucky enough not to be sucked into the global order. Perhaps they’re just preoccupied with other aspects of the human experience.
Regardless, the point is that anything can be real. We just have to imagine it, and then translate our imagination into a reality that we can all participate in maintaining. So the question becomes: Are you willing to do that?
Till next time,
OluTimehin
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