The Interconnectedness of Everything

[This is a huge post for my blog, so fair warning on that.]

Hey, world. It's been a while, how are you? I'm bored at work (our workload has been completed for the day), and I haven't done one of these in some time, so I figured I should jump back into the thoughtscape and sample a word salad.

"The Interconnectedness of Everything." Sounds nice, right? The name is not at all inspired by or homage to "The Theory of Everything," a much more boring and well-crafted set of ideas by a man whose intellect I could never come close to grasping. Oops, I'm digressing already.

I should get it out of the way that my "everything" is not actually the sum total of all things in the universe (unlike Mr. Hawking), but rather, it is the everything of OUR world; society, culture, the human mind, media, friendships, parents, religion, philosophy, and knowledge itself. And since I've already gone ahead and defined one broad term for you, my non-existent reader, I may as well define the other nebulous word too.

"Interconnectedness." In this case, this word refers to the feedback loop that is created by the aforementioned "everything." The cause and effect that each individual thing has on each other thing, and the flow that is generated by the amalgam of all of those things.

This is pretty wordy and unhelpful, so I'll start by giving you an analogy and work my way through the idea piece by piece.

Imagine a river that feeds into itself; a mobius loop; a positive feedback loop. Any old ring where the end meets the beginning. This river/ring/loop/etc. is our "everything." Each water droplet represents an individual, an idea, an action, a construct, a thought, an experience- you name it.

Still kind of hard to see where I'm going with this, right? Sorry, it's a complicated topic!

Imagine your favorite political problem or philosophical issue- its very existence is a testament to its ability to survive; to respawn in the hearts and minds of others. And the same is true of the ideas counter to that movement. Take sexism. Sexism does not exist in a vacuum and individuals are not born sexist. We are raised and, at some point, we collect sexist thoughts that we express with our words or behaviors. Yet most of us acknowledge that these things are wrong or bad. So how do they persist? Simple psychology and the nature of society and culture. We inherit thoughts and actions from those sources of inspiration and influence in our lives.

These sources of influence are everywhere from the moment we're born and they vary in strength. Your parents typically hold the most influence over you for a great deal of your life. Perceived authority figures are often below that. Selected heroes/idols and your peer group below that. The media is often below that. And then bringing up the rear are the people and things that have little to no influence over us- people we actively dislike or distrust. These people often carry NEGATIVE influence with us, turning us further away from whatever beliefs or actions they may take. But they appear to be a lone exception where everyone and everything else I listed makes us more likely to behave or think in a certain way.

Remember being a child, when you wanted to be just like your parents (many of you, anyway)? Or wanting to do the things your friends did, or have the same toys or games they did? How about wanting to emulate what you saw on TV? You wanted to be the main character in your favorite show because it held sway over you. All things in our "everything" hold some kind of sway over us, ranging from quite a lot (parents, religion, authority figures, best friends), to a very tiny amount(strangers, a TV show you've seen once, a single commercial, someone else's religion). This influence is where the flow of our river begins.

It is important to interject here to remind you that this doesn't apply in the same way to everyone. People are influenced to varying degrees by those in their lives based on their individual circumstances and, to some extent, their genetics. However, no one is free from this influence (except maybe sociopaths? That's sort of a gray area I'd like to investigate) We're all subject to the ebbs and flows of society and, in particular, the elements of society that we hold in higher regard. Unfortunately, when we're young, we hold in high regard people, events, and ideologies without knowing why, so we often make fundamental decisions about our own personalities long before we have the capacity to understand what we've done.

To give you an example, a child who knows only an abusive parent and no other life cannot conceive of any other way it could or should be, and may hold that parent in high regard much more easily than an outside observer who knows how wrong abuse is. A pitfall of human empathy is often the inability to recognize what kind of emotional or existential knowledge another individual may have access to at any given time in their life. This often causes us to arrogantly assume we know better than others, when in reality, our own knowledge set isn't always applicable in another's life scenario.

So, our parents and friends influence us- so what? That's obvious.

True, but many people don't take that a step further to understand WHY and to what extent others are influential in our lives. Consider this: Despite the fact that very very few people advocate outright violence to solve problems, we have an enormously high violent crime, child abuse, and murder rate in our country. We're not being explicitly told that violence is good, but our culture is one in which violence is implicitly seen as a "problem solving" element. Particularly in media, but also in the way our country conducts itself internationally and in the way men are raised. We're often taught that there's nothing wrong with violence. This leads to our acceptance of it as a standard and normal activity, which leads to its proliferation on a larger, cultural scale.

I'll give you my perspective on this-

The way I conceive of all areas of thought is in "messages." When your mom tells you to put that toy truck down and where your dress so that you can be pretty, that's not just one "message," but that's at least three "messages" all together:

1. There's a difference between boy toys and girl toys;
2. A girl's obligation is to be "pretty."
3. What we wear is objectively important and ought to be determined by our gender.

Most people who have taken psychology or sociology know that even our most well-intentioned thoughts can have several implicit messages within like the ones listed above.

So, all areas of thought come to us in the way of messages. There are millions, billions, trillions- uncountable, unfathomable numbers of messages that we receive over the course our lives- even in our every day minutiae. If this is true, why aren't we constantly overwhelmed with competing messages? How do we create a coherent and sane personality in the mileau?

Remember what I said earlier that all nodes of influence affect us more or less powerfully depending on how highly we regard them. A poster that tells us how to act or who to be won't influence us as much as our parents or a significant other telling us how to act or who to be... Unless we had no knowledge base to work from at that point. This is where the distinction between children and adults comes into play (and then on a broader scale, the distinction between people who have knowledge about a topic and people who don't).

Children are so easily influenced because they don't have a working base of knowledge on certain topics. They are a blank slate, an expression often used of children. Without an existing set of messages, there is nothing to temper or guide new messages received, so new messages are taken as gospel. This is one partial explanation for why children have little to no capacity to understand gray areas; kids are often polarizing and unable to parse nuance because there's nothing in their mind to suggest to them that a message NEEDS to be tempered when it's received.

It's an observed phenomenon that children who are told not to lie are unable to distinguish being wrong with lying, and are equally frustrated when a parent is wrong vs. when they are lying, for example. Once their knowledge base and set of ingrained messages reaches a large enough capacity, nuance begins to emerge. This is when we see people make decisions for themselves based on conflicting messages.

The idea doesn't disappear when we become adults, but what we see instead is that most areas of knowledge leave us inundated with messages. There are very few areas in which we receive few to no messages or messages exclusively of a single kind , and it's in those areas that this effect is truly apparent, and, as an aside, it's why we see people hold EXTREME views about things they don't have any personal experience with.
This is part of why, for example, so many people have hated the LGBTQ community; a lack of understanding. Their lack of knowledge base was supplanted over time with a VERY specific set of messages from a very particular set of sources that all more or less said the same or similar things. This is how fervent ignorance is born.

But there are also realms where we seldom receive any messages of any kind- taboo areas or areas considered to mundane or complicated for us to discuss them regularly. Sexuality, and in particular, kinky activities are one area where people receive very few messages at all, and so we often stumble blindly making an enormous number of mistakes when we make our own forays into those areas. Because we didn't have existing messages from which to derive a knowledge base- not even a biased and misinformed one. It's in situations like these that we are most vulnerable to new messages regardless of our age. This is why a great deal of misinformation about kink culture has proliferated since 50 Shades of Gray came out. It presented thousands of messages about an area in which very few people had any kind of pre-existing messages whatsoever. Because the book and movie were seen by some individuals as an excellent work, its influence on them was high enough for them to take those messages more seriously than they otherwise might have. This resulted in a non-negligible spread of ignorance after they came out.

The effect is virtually unnoticeable if, however, it's a movie or a book about a topic that we've already had millions of messages about. A totally fictional movie about unlocking "the other 90% of our brain" for example, doesn't make us actually think that that's possible usually- particularly if it results in superpowers in the movie. We know that superpowers like that don't exist through countless examples of superpowers not existing, and exactly 0 examples of superpowers actually existing. Though some people may see that movie (It's "Lucy," by the way) and come out thinking that we don't use all of our brain power, which is a rather common misconception about psychology. So in that regard, it's a message that they don't have an existing knowledge base for, and it is thus an area where ignorance can be pushed by media.

So, now that I've started down this road, let's bring the beginning into all of this- the river.

Each of these trillions of messages is a drop of water. Each message collectively pushes our culture- our society- in a direction, pushes the river a tiny, nearly insignificant amount. In turn, our society takes that information and, if it's accepted by a majority (or really any significant number of people), applies it to life in our society, which in turn, spreads that message once again, ad nauseum. The consequence is nearly insignificant effects multiplied an almost infinite number of times to create actual significant momentum. We see this effect in every realm, but a good one is to look at dating. We very rarely get comprehensive or statistical or academic information about dating. We usually get firsthand/secondhand experiences from others or we get our information from the media. Rom coms, "chick flicks," or TV shows. As a result, dating is largely a trial-by-fire mess that a lot of people never get good at. Our collective knowledge on dating is made up so much of totally bonkers messages that warp our expectations so that we think, for example, stalking someone can be a legitimate way to win their heart. Now, most of us date enough that we divest ourselves of these expectations when it becomes obvious that they're ludicrous. We grow and place less weight on our initial message and more weight on the messages received from our own personal experiences in the realm.

In a broad scope, this is how it happens in all realms. We take in a constant stream of messages that we apply liberally to our own lives and we adjust how highly we view those messages as experience dictates to us whether or not those messages were relevant, acceptable, helpful, moral, etc. It's through this methodology that culture isn't perpetually self-reinforcing in its entirety. There's often a small window for us to overcome many messages so long as there's a decent base of messages that run counter to those original messages. This is why we often see insular religious communities scarcely lose members while communities with a lot of dialogue and in areas with differing spiritual ideologies will often see a great deal of conversion. The more available new and different messages are to you, the more likely you are to be able to create a viewpoint having taken into considering both the old messages and the new messages.

Despite the opportunity for change, however, there's still the problem of relative influence. If, for example, satanists came to a very Christian little town, the messages received by some Christians (by others in their midst) would likely predispose them to think very little of the satanists. Without any amount of regard for them, they're not likely to seriously consider the messages the satanists are spreading, even if they're acceptable, moral, good, and helpful messages. Because of this effect, changing the status quo is an insanely difficult task because the status quo often paints change as problematic, evil, or immoral. That's why change has to be appealing to a greater extent than it is scary. The perceived import of the messages brought by "Change" must therefore exceed the perceived import of existing messages. That's a crazy tall order, and that's why it's so hard for movements focused on fundamental change to make any headway. Feminism, for example, suffers from this problem. It faces the uphill battle of both the negative messages of the status quo and also the task of proving itself beneficial for everyone (or at least not hurtful). For many people who have been inundated with messages about "feminazis" thus far, that can be a nearly impossible perspective to consider. As someone very sympathetic to the cause, this is an area where it's apparent how unwilling people are to accept or even examine perspectives that deviate from what they've known their entire lives.



This has been by far my longest post, so I'll wrap it up here. Just remember that everything you do is a message (or multiple!). Sometimes to others, sometimes to yourself, reinforcing existing messages. No act or thought is without power. Many simply have an apparently invisible amount of power. But when those things are placed alongside millions of messages in the same vein, suddenly you have a stream trickling along. Enough separate streams give you a creek. Enough creeks gives you a river, made entirely of individual water droplets; individual messages, seemingly unimportant, and yet part of an unimaginable force.

Be mindful of your messages and be mindful of the interconnectedness of everything.