Generating Positive Signals

I’m in the process of starting a podcast.
What I mean by that is I sit and talk for half an hour on Friday or Saturday,
hate it, delete it and try to do better next time. Those of you who’ve read my
early fiction should be delighted to see that I’m learning how to start new
skills more effectively!

Anyway, this was a topic I’ve been trying
to express in my recordings, and I think what I’ll do to “soft start” this new
project of mine is to get feedback on some blog posts that I later chat about
on the podcast, and this can be the first, so you reading this and sharing your
feelings will directly influence the scope/ voice of things to come! As it
always does of course :)

I’m always thinking about social
responsibility, and I have a recent concrete example of how I think our bare-bones
responsibility to each other manifests itself.

A few weeks ago now, I had the first
meeting with my new department. I was one English-speaking guy in a room of
twenty new Norwegians, and we were all going around presenting ourselves.
(They’re all laughing at jokes I don’t understand, and I’m following suit
because I don’t want my new manager to know how
limited my Norwegian actually is.) When it was my turn to introduce
myself, I said ‘Hi, I’m Leo, I’m a process engineer. I’m from Glasgow in
Scotland but I’m working in Oslo now, and I live with my husband Juan who came
here from Spain. I’m seriously considering getting a cat but it may be too much
responsibility’ (A-haw-haw-haw…)

Who cares, right? Exactly But I’d just come
out to a room full of twenty people I didn’t know. I was tired and feeling a
bit shy and didn’t want to say anything at all. I still said something because
I knew it would impress my new manager, but also, I’d watched this Big Think
interview with Andrew Sullivan (can’t find the exact video, but it’s still
online somewhere), and he said ‘If everyone just came out, there would be no
more homophobia’, the theory being that everyone would see, maybe even be
surprised by, who around them was gay, and they would experience firsthand the
fact that there’s nothing significantly different or special about gay people at
all, and have no reason to hate or fear them.

When you’re gay, you have to come out in
every new environment you find yourself in, for the simple reason that by
default, most people assume you’re straight, which is a reasonable assumption
given maybe 95% of the population is? So I don’t mind, and from age 20 onwards,
I haven’t experienced explicit homophobia at all, which leads me to believe,
hopefully correctly, that I never will—if it was only going to be half my time
out the closet, better the latter half! Still, there’s no guarantee what will
happen in the next situation.

There are protests, there are pride
parades, there are online petitions, there’s all of that. But the most powerful
thing I can do to ensure what I believe is the best direction for society, or
to ensure that I am a representative for the social justice movements I feel a
part of (already sounding too lofty), is just being myself and being honest in
every situation that arises and expressing my opinion when it’s asked for. As
far as I’m concerned, this is our most basic and most powerful responsibility,
and anything else is a bonus.

Am I then saying you never need to join a
protest, run a marathon, write to your local representative? You don’t, necessarily.
I think it’s great if you do these things but you should recognise that when it
comes to what you stand for, if you participate in these ways and more, you’re
doing overtime. Which is great: go you! By all means do! But recognise that
your most powerful tool is your own life, your own behaviour, your own signal.
Similarly, if you’re quiet about how you feel in everyday life but go home and
sign e-petitions or wait until a fun run to form an opinion about something,
you’re probably operating in a way less effective manner.

I had this lecture in first year Medicine
about neurons. Neurons are nerve cells in your brain and spine matter, and they
send signals via action potentials, which release chemicals at a synapse, which
generate some action at a muscle or another nerve cell. An action potential can
be triggered either by a single neuron sending a big signal or many neurons
sending smaller signals. To demonstrate this, the lecturer included a slide
that had nothing to do with the rest of his lecture, and everyone in the room
all turned and murmured to each other in confusion, which would have been
enough for him to check, if it was an error, if a slide was out of place.
Similarly, he said, one person could have stood up and shouted ‘Hey! That’s the
wrong slide!’ or something to that effect. Either one shouter or a room full of
murmurers would have fixed the problem.

People are an organic system, and the
parallel of action potentials and the course of political decisions/ justice
movements are but one example of where we have a system-based equivalence from
what we know about physiology—that is, both neurons and societies function the
same, in the lecturer’s analogy.

I think what it means to feel empowered to
exact change in your society is again: to live by example, to express your
opinion in organic situations when they are called for, and to tell people disagree
when you do. Interesting, this point: I don’t know how valid this feeling is,
but whenever I’m at a bar or having friends over, I habitually avoid any topic
that would require an opinion, because I get the impression—through outraged
ridiculing scoffs and other snubs—that anything “debate-adjacent” would be rude
to bring up. This makes a lot of social interaction pretty bland. I also know
many people who declare that they hate a film they’ve been enjoying up until
the 90% mark or so because it has a sad ending. Or think of all those blogs and
videos and so on, after Inception came out, where everyone was using every rule
of physics or philosophy at hand to decrypt the film’s true ending. I don’t
personally care for endings of anything much at all, because any true piece of
art is asking, “Well: what do you
think about this?” And many really great pieces of art are really promoting
confusion, because often there isn’t a single answer to how to act or behave or
what to believe, but that doesn’t mean you get to cop out entirely from
choosing a side. Some people have become so accustomed to not having to form
opinions that they become outraged and dismiss anything in their vicinity that
does, or that makes them think. Are these the same people who are more than
willing to bring up Hitler in Youtube comments sections? Probably. But this
invisible inversion of local action in favour of weaker anonymous action is
because it takes so much fucking courage and persistence just to be who you are
everyday. Typically a few days after you think everyone around you has
collectively broken your spirit, you’ll discover that they’ve been forced to
accept you for who you are. My poor sis is still in the thicket: at the primary
school where she teaches in Glasgow, the teachers that pass her say ‘You’re too
cheery to do this job.’ What the fuck does that even mean? Fuck Glasgow, man.

It’s nice to feel a part of something
bigger, but it’s more important, I would argue, to remember the power of your
individuality. Whenever anyone tells you about the paths in life that don’t
effectively satisfy—money, fame, promiscuity etc—it’s because all these things
are so emotionally distant from your everyday life, really. The most emotional satisfaction
you’re ever going to reap is from those around you. It’s not going to be
Twitter followers or prostitutes at your deathbed (you do what you want, but,
generally speaking.) The internet is an excellent way to signal things on a
large scale, but it’s an accessory aspect of communication for humans. We
weren’t really designed to use the internet. We’re still way more affected by
the things around us than the things far away from us, and with good reason:
there’s only so much one person can do, or should be expected to do, but we’re
so used to the daily assault of bad news that the kind of background paralysis
it creates is considered part of life.

Just by living I think we are generating
implicit messages about what we want to change. However, there are a number of
negative consequences of just kicking about on the planet that, extrapolated in
the wrong direction, could make you question your very existence, down to the
carbon emissions of your own breath.

Am I saying we should reduce the scope of
our actions to only that which we directly encounter day-to-day? No, but I
think the many calls to action I receive daily don’t make me feel empowered at
all. Instead, they generate guilt that I’m not doing enough. If I reframe these
accessory methods of generating positive signals (protests, petitions etc.) as
bonus time, I actually feel more incentivised to participate on a greater
scale. I feel less guilty, less helpless and more compassionate, and whatever
the situation, that should always be
the goal.

Whatever system you find yourself in, you
can do more from the inside of it. No longer feel this guilt or lack of power
in the face of massive issues by re-evaluating exactly what is a reasonable way
for you to contribute while you carry on living a happy life, as is your right
and responsibility.