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N O T I C E : : m e m o r y _ s t r e a m _ l o c a t e d
I D : : C o n s e n s u s
T Y P E: : R E C O L L E C T I V E
It was comments sections that spurred the realisation. Such an utterly mundane thing, but one day I stopped to wonder: why in the stars does anyone leave comments on things? And when I actually stopped to think about it, it puzzled me to no end. Why would a person spend their time attempting to communicate with people whom they will never form meaningful relationships? What purpose is there in expressing your opinion about something, if no one who you will ever meet or have to interact with will ever see it? The answer is that there is none, but millions upon millions- perhaps even billions- of people are driven to do so anyway.
Perhaps if it had been limited to that alone, then I never would have thought much of it. A tendency to communicate without purpose is relatively harmless in and of itself, after all. Yet that was only half of these interactions. There was another half - the half I knew much better personally - which took this mundane behaviour and rendered it downright harmful. What I'm talking about are the uncountable millions of arguments that play out daily across the entirety of the fleetnet; taking place on every single site in which two sapient beings can communicate with each other, and encompassing every topic - no matter how mundane or inconsequential - that one could possibly imagine.
The way that people would devote minutes, sometimes hours of their time to formulating counterarguments against people whose beliefs differed from theirs, when they had never met the person in question before that interaction and would never see them again afterwards. By every imaginable metric, such a course of action is meaningless. And yet I have seen more people than I could possibly imagine, myself included many a time, engage in it; many of them thousands upon thousands of times over the course of years or decades.
I asked myself what purpose there could possibly be for such an action. When I thought back on why I had done it myself, it was born of an inexplicable desire to ensure that my opinion - the one which I held to be right - was held by other people as well. A drive, in other words, to seek consensus.
I can only assume that such an instinct developed in the time when landamaeris were part of smaller groups. It may well have served some sort of purpose in our evolutionary history, but in the present, it has become something that leads to petty squabbling and infighting. More severely, it turns those wretched
ch'ikan against us because of our trend towards non-conformity. All landamaeris regardless of neurotype are inclined towards this behaviour, but we suffer disproportionately from it on account of how we are resistant to enculturation, and so do not trend towards consensus in our beliefs the way they do.
But worst of all is the way we claw at each other on account of it. How many
yuyayni have I seen wound each other because of this worthless instinct? We differ from one-another at times nearly as much as we differ from the
ch'ikan; consensus is not only impossible for us, it is downright foolish to strive for. And yet instincts which we had no part in the creation of, which were developed for a species which we are trying to evolve away from, bind us and force us to act in ways that are to our own detriment.
My own biology drives me not only to harm myself, but to harm others; to harm the ones who I care about.
How, knowing this, could I ever be anything but disgusted to be a person?
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N O T I C E : : m e m o r y _ s t r e a m _ t e r m i n a t e d
