One of my favourite quotes ever is by Lily Tomlin about a realisation she once made that changed her world: “I said ‘Somebody should do something about that.’ Then I realized I am somebody."
The reason I was thinking of this quote recently (besides the fact I have pinned a copy of it in my room for years) is I was reading a comment in a medical magazine addressing the high rate of mental illness in our society. The writer rightly identified that it is the way our society has been shaped, leaving people with few others able to be called friends, people to talk to, less faith in the spiritual and religious clerics, less time to meditate and accommodate our inner thoughts, that have contributed to greater psychological distress levels than before. Our jobs demand increasingly greater time and mental efforts, our motives have been adjusted to the pursuit of material things rather than personal growth and realization, etc., etc. But it’s not that that I want to discuss today, rather it is the next part of this commentator’s contribution. She suggested that ‘the government should do something about it’. “It” referring to having less friends, spending more time at work, etc….
The government should do something about it. Really? “The government”? The government is expected to tell us and mandate how we spend our time on this Earth, who to trust and who to believe, what to prioritise? I couldn’t believe such a suggestion should be made by someone who is in our society regarded as “intelligent” just by virtue of having earned a medical degree. But the issue isn’t one of how intelligent a person is but rather of feeling so drained of power. Remember Seligman and Maier’s dog experiments where they described “learned helplessness”? That is exactly the situation so many of us can find ourselves in when we forget that we are human – and powerful! Even a very academically learned person can learn helplessness, believing that an only an external, greater body can bring about change. It is such a shame that we have forgotten that we as individuals are in the driver’s seat, that we are deciders of our fate not merely victims of it, that we can be the somebody that brings about the change you long to see. And I don’t mean to imply that we are one individual to change the world (though that is also a choice if you’re brave enough to believe it), but ‘the world’ radiates out from ourselves and it does start with us.
The other thing I find disturbing about the government ‘doing something about it’, being expected to bring about change not just in operational standards of running a society but also in that society’s consciousness is that the past has shown us that it’s not a very wise choice. Some of the things democratic societies pride themselves on are things like freedom of speech and religious choice, etc. But handing these rights over for the sake of uniformity is a very dangerous thing! By definition the way governments “do something about it” is by enacting legislation, by outlining specific rules and specific exceptions to these rules. Human psychology is not very amenable to these sorts of rigid concepts! Consider, for example, countries with laws governing certain types of “morality” where governments can make it a crime to have sexual intercourse between consenting adults who are not legally married to each other or who are of the same sex. That is a government with a right to govern over private matters, with a right to “do something about” the things you do in your own bedroom and a right to mandate who you can express your feelings for.
What am I trying to say? I am just hoping to remind us that we aren’t powerless, helpless, completely reliant on external constructs to bring about any change. If we identify a condition we are dissatisfied with, it IS within our power to start a change.
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