Social Media and Individual Responsibility
Questioner: Namaste Acharya Ji, first of all, massive respect to you. I was mainly touched by your work through the Earth Festival, and the things that you talked about regarding karma were very interesting to me. I hope you will revisit them today, which I am looking forward to.
I am a PhD student in my fourth year in the design department, and I am mainly working with educational games and how we can use games to harness some sort of education. I have seen a lot of little children learning vocabulary through playing games like PUBG and other things. So, I thought, why not try to intentionally harness that? That is what I do.
My question to you is: I was reading somewhere that Chanakya in Arthashastra (and I might be mistaken, so sorry about the specifications, apologies for that) pointed out the fact that a king, if he needs to be successful and wants to rule his kingdom not just with dictatorial absolute power but successfully, he or she needs to pay attention to and extract the power of alcohol. He did not pass judgment on whether alcohol is good or bad, but he did understand that a tool which is powerful has to be understood by the person who is leading the kingdom.
That is when I was struck with the idea that ancient texts and knowledge, that have been written in olden times might have some answers or some insights into the contemporary problems that we have. So, I was wondering that in the contemporary current intellectual discussions that happen in India, I often see a lack of, or at least an inadequate importance put upon, the role that social media plays in our current consciousness. I see that they do discuss it, but they handwave it as a technology that is there and has some influence. However, I rarely see that in Indian discussions we really dive into what problem it is creating or benefits.
I understand that cognition has been manipulated throughout centuries by newspapers, television channels, and several other mediums. However, they were local or national, or at least they were tangible in the sense that they could be held accountable or could be rectified if need be. That is not the case with social media. It is mostly privately owned, the incentives of the owners are at least not known to us, and the incentives also keep changing with time. I am not saying that it is bad by any means, just that it is extremely powerful and yet to be completely understood in its impact.
My question here is: do the Vedantic teachings have any insight on a spectacle like this? Or if they did try to comment on such a contemporary phenomenon, how would they perceive social media and its ever-increasing role in our current society?
And a small question would be: what would Vedanta comment on the ever-increasing lack of attention that we are gradually and continuously experiencing a diminishing attention span?
Thank you. Sorry for the long question.
Acharya Prashant: See, Vedanta investigates the mind, and whereas the deepest desire and the ultimate destiny of the mind is liberation, yet it is habituated to all kinds of bondages. That is the condition of the mind. You can call that human consciousness.
Our inclinations, our tendencies, our habits are at odds with our welfare. We need to be liberated, but we want and slip towards bondages. So, that is what the mind is — an entity at odds with its own real interests. So, the mind is very easily attracted towards pomp, show, sexuality, display of riches. It likes to be entertained so much that it sometimes even deliberately wants to keep itself in illusions. That is how the mind is.
The mind slips easily towards falseness, but requires discipline and deliberate effort to rise towards knowledge, understanding, and liberation.
With the mind being like this, you have the social media technology in front of you. One of the things of the mind is to feel lonely since birth and clamor for company and social attention. And now you have Facebook or Twitter, and you want attention. You want attention, that is your mind. The others want to be entertained and titillated, that is their mind.
You do not really want the Truth. You need the Truth, though. But you do not want the Truth, that is your mind. And the others too equally want to avoid the Truth, even though they equally need the Truth, that is the other’s mind. Humanity has one mind. Its expressions are varied, but fundamentally the tendencies of the mind are the same, and equally the final destiny of the mind is one.
So, what do I do? I feel lonely. What do I do? I look around for attention. The easiest way to gain attention is to peddle mischief. Why? Because the others too are attracted towards mischief. The lowest common denominator has a tendency to catch on and spread like wildfire. All that is worst about us will be the fastest to spread. And we just said that that which is sublime in us, worthy within us, requires first of all effort, time, patience, discipline to cultivate, and a lot of equal effort to propagate. Whereas mischief spreads on its own.
Falseness is contagious. One person with the inclination to spread false ideas or information can do it very easily. Whereas somebody with the intention to counter falseness will have to work ten times as hard. So now you see, when we get a propagating machinery like social media in our hand, what use is it going to be put to? It has amplified the worst within us.
Though it is just a technology, as you put in your question, we, being the users of that technology, have put it to the worst use, as is our habit of putting everything at our disposal at the service of our lowly tendencies. And so, social media too has been made a servant to our lowly tendencies. So, you rightly put it, there is no accountability. Anybody can say anything, and that gets magnified very soon. In fact, the worse the kind of content, the faster the speed with which it spreads, and that becomes known to all. And we all are hungry for recognition, prestige, attention. So, we very quickly took the hint. We very quickly see what it is that sells, what it is that brings instant rewards. And also, a lot of money is at stake.
If you can become a good YouTuber or recognized social media personality, that fills up your coffers as well. So now, a very easy, very cheap formula has been revealed, do the worst kind of nonsense and make a fortune out of it. And this formula has been picked up by society in general, by politicians, by corporations, by everybody.
So, that is what is happening. When you had regulated bodies, then they were answerable, and you knew the names and faces of those who were in charge. When it comes to social media, hardly anybody is in charge. Now the mischief maker is faceless, anonymous, because there are just so many of them that you cannot call out or point out one single face. Anonymity does not consist of nobody having a face. These days, anonymity really means billions of faces. When there are billions of mischief makers. How many will you block? How many will you call out? So that is what has happened.
And regulation cannot be the answer now, because regulation is impractical, impossible. You cannot regulate so many people, and you cannot have laws that punish people for their intentions.
Of course, if there is explicit content you can punish it, if somebody is saying something that is factually misleading, you can punish it. But then mischiefs can be of a thousand kinds, and those kinds are all very subjective. You cannot identify them, right? So regulation has become impossible. What then is the way ahead? The only solution then is individual responsibility. And individual responsibility cannot come by way of legislation or regulation.
The only solution is the cultural environment with spirituality at its center. Only then can people be self-regulated.
Or you could have a situation similar to one in China, where the state has a million eyes and hands and is clamping down on everybody and anybody who dares to transgress. But obviously, we do not want that to happen. Firstly, that benefits no one. Secondly, that will very soon prove ineffective. So then, you need people with their minds awakened. You need people who can operate from a position of internal discipline. And this is not a mere utopia. I am not talking about idealism. I am talking of the only practical solution possible now.
So, what do we do then?
Real spirituality has to be promoted. You cannot leave it at the mercy of blind social forces or market forces or even the whims of democracy. A few things have to be recognized as being fundamentally important and therefore be patronized by the society. I am talking of Vedanta here. I am talking of core self-inquiry here. That has to become a part of mainstream education. Education cannot now remain a means to just earn your bread. Education cannot be just about building a career.
We are into rough terrain and choppy waters now. Humanity does not have much time left. We need to be awakened very quickly. It is a historical emergency. The problems that you see with social media are but a tiny reflection of the real catastrophe, we unfortunately have at hand. So, that needs to be done. The real inner center being promoted, self-inquiry being promoted, is the most important need of the hour. And I am saying that not as an exaggeration, but with very careful deliberation over long years. There is nothing more important today than awakening the individual.
It was always important historically, but today it is a do-or-die thing. You do not do that, and you will find us slipping more and more into a dark abyss, into the bottomless lowly levels of consciousness. There will be no end to how low we can fall, and probably the fall would be interrupted only by our final and complete ruin. So that is where we stand.
The worst has become mainstream, because the worst will spread the fastest and will therefore become mainstream. The ones who actually need to be in asylums and sometimes probably in jails have become social media idols and superstars. So you see what is happening. The bottom-most is expanding and taking all of us in its fold. The worst among us is overpowering the rest of us and threatening the highest. Right now, the worst is winning hands down, extremely comfortably.
And we are unable to see beyond our ideals of freedom of expression and democracy and equality. With such ignorance of spirituality, we are unable to perceive that whereas animals are all equal to each other, human beings are greatly different. They are not merely different in terms of consciousness, they are higher and lower and that needs to be accepted. And the freedom of expression of the lower has to be checked, limited. Otherwise, as we said, the lowly will become the mainstream.
You allow the worst tendencies that we have to propagate themselves, and those tendencies will gain in popularity because there is the evil within us just waiting to express itself. And when it sees its reflection in others, it feels emboldened, empowered. So, that person is creating such mischief and getting away with it, not only getting away with it but is actually being rewarded for it. What prevents me from creating similar mischief? That kind of tendency sits within all of us.
Therefore, the ideals of the European Renaissance, the ideals that lie at the bottom of the modern world, have to be reinvestigated. I am talking of these things, unchecked freedom and things like equality and such. We know of these ideals. Not that I am against these ideals. I am now talking of going beyond these ideals. I am not talking of something in opposition to them. I am not talking of their dualistic counterparts. I am talking of transcending those ideals now, so that we may have something that is better and more suited when it comes to challenging the calamity facing us.
Questioner: Thank you, Acharya Ji. Do you have hope, if it boils down to individual responsibility? Do you have hope in the current humans that spirituality can be made as contagious as the phones in our pockets, the ordering of food at a whim, shopping at a whim, browsing sexuality at a whim?
Acharya Prashant: There is no option, and when you are optionless then hope becomes irrelevant. Even if there is no hope, you have to work towards the right. You have to try till your last, because there is no option. And it is not as if only evil can succeed. Your foundation, when it comes to social media, works very hard to increase its social media reach. And it is not as if we fail all the time. It is not as if nobody wants to go through the content we put on the various platforms.
So obviously, success is possible, though it is going to be difficult. The task is onerous. It is far easier, as we said, to propagate mischief, and Truth is a difficult thing to propagate, to take to others. But if you try hard enough, then you may succeed.
And when you try hard enough, it is the Truth that empowers you to propagate itself. It is not even your own personal energy that comes to serve the Truth.
You might find this a bit complex or whatever, but just stay with this. When you are on the right side of consciousness, then obviously the task is tougher. But that tougher task is made easier by being on the right side. The rightness itself supports you from within. So it does not remain that tough after all. All in all, it is a better deal to be on the right side of consciousness.
Questioner: Thank you. Thank you so much.
