The Fight To Grab The Prettiest Mask

“YOU CAN PICK UP WHICHEVER MASK YOU LIKE. I WILL MANAGE WITH THE LEFTOVERS”.

How do most people, organizations, institutions, groups, political parties, etc occupy a certain SPACE in the public narrative?

How do most people, organizations, institutions, groups, political parties, etc occupy the MENTAL SPACE of people all over the world?

Usually, such SPACE is NOT occupied by BEING there!!!

Usually, those who claim to occupy a certain SPACE do not reside or stand where they claim to be. Usually, those who pretend to take a certain public position consistently do the exact opposite of what they claim to stand up for. They do so not only in the dark, but in the broad daylight, too.

SPACE is ALWAYS grabbed by the words you choose to describe yourself.

Nobody ever goes to check out or find out exactly where you stand. They only listen to what SPACE you claim to own or belong to.

Think about all those individuals and groups that call themselves “liberal”, “secular”, “progressive”, etc

Think about all those who call themselves “free-thinkers”, “rationalists”, etc

How do they occupy the SPACE they claim to occupy?

When it comes to occupying a space in a public narrative, there is one and only strategy that works – LOUD, UNABASHED, SELF-ASSERTION.

They do it with unchallenged success every single time because of how the other side reacts to such self-assertions.

Whenever somebody LOUDLY grabs a space in the public narrative, the other side just vacates that space tamely.

They don’t even ask the claiming side to validate if they own, or even reside in that SPACE. They don’t even ask for any substantiation that they really stand where they claim to stand.

As a result, the other side cramps themselves to fit into whatever space remains after the self-certifiers are done with their ever-expanding space-grabbing act.

After ceding all SPACE to the illegal occupiers, what is one left with?

After tamely vacating all the space that the self-certifiers demand, you may be left with the following description of yourself – “conservative, regressive, fundamentalist, fascist, communal, bigot, supremacist, patriarchical, superstitious, non-literary, non-creative, dumb, good for nothing, blind-following, uncouth idiot“.

Because you have ceded all the other spaces to those who came and picked up whatever they wanted, without having to prove their claims to the space, because you let them use all the keywords of superiority for themselves without contesting them, all you are left to use for yourself are the decrepit, rancid, left-over words.

Those who kill or support or justify killings in the name of religion walk with the tag of “seculars”, while those fighting to prevent their adorable Goddesses from being called “prostitutes” are proud being labelled “communal”.

Those who unabashedly make their living out of spreading fake news walk in the glory of being “fact-checkers” and “free-thinkers”, while those objecting to the propagation of fake news are content being called “suppressors of free speech”.

Those who swear by the latest food-fad, which is going to be junked in the next 21 days and replaced by another food-fad, are “scientific”, while the ones who have a support of thousands of years of tried and tested secrets of nutrition, healing and medicinal values are happy being called “proud cow-urine drinkers”.

Today, a popular professor of a premium university in the heartland of India’s Capital called out to “those carrying invisible privileges on their backs” to “let the unprivileged hate you and generously accept that hate“. Of course, he is the one who gets the label of being a “social revolutionary” and an ambassador of “social equality and justice”. Anybody not willing to be victimized by such hate is a “supremacist”.

THE WORLD DOES NOT HAVE INFINITE SPACE. If we keep ceding space to anyone who grabs the SPACE they want, we would be left with no space even to exist, let alone space to spread your arms or extend your legs. If you let everyone pick up their choice of labels to mask their evil intents and deeds, you would be left with only the evil words to describe yourselves.

In a world that is run solely by public narratives, constantly ceding space to whoever lays claim to it is a certain suicide.

This is what leads to situations where somebody who is abused, beaten up or even killed, can be dismissed off as “totally deserving that”, and not having anyone bat an eyelid, because he belonged to the WRONG SPACE, while even an unintentional scratch to someone else belonging to the RIGHT SPACE makes toxic world headlines.

Because these claims come from the morally high-handed SPACE, they are beyond any discussion, dispute, challenge, argument or need for justification. Even the judiciary all over the world end up leaning that way.

This is why one group can rubbish what they don’t like by branding it “discriminatory” without having to prove that it is so, and justify what they like by labelling it “humanitarian” without having to prove it is so. The public narrative works solely on ASSERTIONS.

After ceding SPACE to the self-certifiers voluntarily, the next reaction to this appropriation of words and labels, is to start vilifying those labels. For example, a large number of people use the labels “liberals, seculars” as a derogatory term in their private conversations and feel totally fulfilled by this toothless vilification. They do not realize, that in the larger battle of occupying mental spaces, the “humanitarian” will always trump over the “discriminatory“.

Deflating others’ balloons in your imaginary mental space accomplishes nothing in the real world. You might feel totally content by privately labelling a “self-professed rationalist” as a “buffoon“, but that buffoon is going to win all battles of public narratives and occupy the most significant podiums of influence.

By definition, the “superstitious” stands NO CHANCE against the “rationalist”.

A battle between a “proud rationalist” and a “proud superstitious” is decided before even it begins.

There is a large section of population that comes with a tabula rasa. They look at the labels around them, and choose the SPACE with the label that resonates with them, and pick up the labels that makes them feel good and superior. School-going kids, teenagers, the indifferent ones, the neutrals, the fence-sitters, those whose entire knowledge of the world comes from catchy headlines, those who live their lives by one-liner quotable quotes – they are all going to pick up the side that have laid claims to possessing lofty ideals, because standing by them gives them a superior self- and societal- image.

What chance do you see for a school child to want to side with the “regressives” as against “progressives”?

No child grows up wanting to be a “ conservative, regressive, fundamentalist, fascist, communal, bigot, supremacist, patriarchical, superstitious, non-literary, non-creative, dumb, good for nothing, blind-following, uncouth idiot“. We have, in many ways, completely lost the public narrative for the next generation.

Even those who stand strongly for a cause start taking backward steps when that cause becomes too synonymous and identified with inglorious labels. Human Beings are suckers for glorification of their values, and cannot stand long with something that doesn’t bring them the right stature and the right pedestal.

If you lose the battle of SPACES, you have lost MOST of the PRESENT, and ALL of the FUTURE.

If you keep running vacating the space that rightly belongs to you, you may one day figuratively fall off the corners of the “flat earth” into a vacuous universe.

If you let everyone else walk away with shinier, prettier masks, all you would be left with are ugly masks that no one would want to look at, stand by or side with anyone wearing those.

What is the way to win this battle?

No, the real solution is in a totally different direction and dimension than what a knee-jerk reaction might tell you it is.

In the next post…