Of opinions and identities

We are fast becoming a nation of ‘fad-ists’. A ‘fad-ist’ is someone who will ridicule an upcoming singer on social media, because that’s the hype, but detest another who does the same on national TV, because “that’s so uncool bro”. Don’t mistake it to be hypocrisy, which is a necessary but insufficient condition for ‘fad-ism’.

This is the state where one finds himself compelled to hitch bandwagons akin to an imaginative world of videogames. Imagine yourself hopping into a van out of another one, as it overtakes your van on the road, and with perfect timing you land into your new ride for the next few days; a cyclical scene that repeats itself ad infinitum. The bandwagon effect has been redefined as the ‘bandwagon bandwagon effect’. Such is the state of our culture — lacking a sense of belonging, we jump ship at the arrival of every new one.

At the heart of the issues ranging from poverty to terrorism is our lack of social awareness that cripples us in attempts to think scientifically. The basis of our opinions is not pure thought but the ‘Chinese-whispered’ prejudices that have trickled down, such that, frustrated out of our skins, the biases see us deride our servants at our dinner tables allowing assimilation with the ‘upper’ stratum of society. But the ‘fad-ist’ in us will step out of bed at dawn sharing Facebook posts of hunger-stricken African children — ship jumped. We depend on others to inform our fondly-held-frequently-alternating-opinions. This dilemma is what qualifies us as ‘fad-ists’. This is a circumstance borne out of a mindset that has started to lay a truck-load of emphasis on symbols, but a straw’s worth of stress on their meanings. So, we will shun our ‘books’ to the corner of our shelves, to be laden with dust, but we will be ‘righteous’ enough to lynch to death a couple of youth, bomb a church and block YouTube. We will condemn, however, still fail to act.

Cultures are preserved by the passing of rites, traditions and customs from one generation to another but in our multi-cultural society, we risk diluting cultural depth by frequently basking in reflected glory, and risk losing identity by conveniently alluding to fads.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 2^nd, 2013.