I was about to go to bed when I remembered I had to watch a video of a talk for our Cross-Cultural Communications class tomorrow. At first, I was totally uninterested in listening. But as the speaker went on, I became immersed in what she was saying.
The talk was all about the danger of the single story. She went on about how we should not just create impressions, perspectives or ideas about a certain subject on the basis of one single story about it. For example, all I hear about Iraq is that they are full of terrorists and that most of them are terrorists and their cities are destroyed and they have no hope. The danger there is that I never get to see the other dimension of the country and the people who thrive there. I do not get to glimpse their wholeness and only digest a chunk and treat it as a full meal. By labeling a subject using the immediate information you gather, you enable yourself to fall into a trap of stereotyping, undue criticisms and half-cooked judgements. She expands this concept with stories of her experiences and her insights on it.
And then she ends with a thought saying that if everyone dismisses the single story, we will have a kind of paradise here on earth. Everything will most likely follow suit in resolution because most misunderstandings, conflicts, disagreements and what not are brought about by labels--by single stories nailed shut to identities. Without these names and descriptives we give each other, we will all be but equals.
She knows it's a long shot and I agree. It's highly impossible for everyone to become so detached to meanings and to labels and to single stories. There will always be concepts of superiority and inferiority. Power will never be phased out. As humans evolve through time, so does their egos. Ego inevitably bloats along with the problems of the world. There's this idea of existing in a world full of advancements (as compared to way back when) that clouds people's minds and further divides the world. Being born to a new generation is like an heirloom and if you belong to a group in the new generation that is far from the immense achievements of Science and Technology or anything that shows a jump away from primitivity, you will instantly be labeled as that and that alone. That is your heirloom and there is nothing you can do about it. You have no power and those who have access to the advancements believe they have the right to boast about it and label everything according to their perception. The single story sticks because people are afraid to lose power and those who don't have the power think they have absolutely no right to voice out their other chapters. It's a highly poisonous cycle that makes the small percentage of the world dominate the whole.
Let's face it, the most powerful only account for so little and one reason why the big chunk cannot move on is because they are forced to stay in place. They are only known for what those in power say they are and that keeps them petrified in their current states. They can change internally but they can never branch out externally. I mean, who controls the media? Who creates speeches about helping the downtrodden and discussing how pitiful their states are? It's always like that for those in power. They describe the ones inferior to them as something to pitied. Which is NOT the case. This is what Chimamanda Adichie also discussed in her talk in the video. Something might be woeful but there must've been a side that was not woeful before. Before you can get to one state, a previous one must have occurred before (argument of order), like for example, the plant has died. Before you can deem it 'dead', it must've been alive before. Same thing with circumstances. Before a country becomes poor, they must've been thriving before. So why stick to single stories? I mean, there's more to a country than its land mass. There's more to a person than his name. Labels should be stripped away completely.
But how?
As said, I agree it's impossible. Saying that a complete paradigm shift to this Utopic idea is possible is probably blasphemous. Am I saying I have no hope for this world? Let's just say that, with tons of enormous mistakes done for the previous decades, the world is still no better off and hope appears to be such a fictitious idea now. For a lack of a better metaphor, it's the unicorn of the present and probably for the days to come. Proper distribution of power is probably needed but it will never happen unless everyone has an open mind. There is no one idea. There is no one rule. And most especially, there is no one story to it all.
If Harry Potter can branch out to 7 stories, what more can a real three-dimensional human being?
P.S.
If you're interested, here's the video. :)
