Our freedoms, dignity and sense of justice are under attack everyday. Frustrated, we jump into egregious battles.

There is a classic piece of monologue in the movie Network, where Peter Finch’s character says, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” We are restless; we are angry; we are frustrated, making for a frenetic, haggard world ready to lash out at the tiniest provocation.

A topical phrase comes to my mind, splashed across national dailies these days –the “rising tide of intolerance”. And the frenzied debates surrounding it — are we intolerant, why are we intolerant, who is to blame. Some think it’s the government, others curse the media; some believe it’s political, while others are sure it’s a social issue.

Things we put up with
Do you know what we tolerate on a daily basis? We walk on filthy streets, we suffer through traffic jams, we experience discrimination, we see violence and turn our eyes, we swallow our pride and say that “the world has changed” when our children decide to not include us in their decisions. Well, the world has changed. But the one thing that has stayed consistent is our capacity to tolerate. We are attuned to it, conditioned since birth to let the status quo be, overshadowed and belittled by our own presumed insignificance. Falling in line with those age-old excuses that “it has always been this way” or because it is better for the “greater good”, but mostly because we know how and when to pick our battles. Humans are smart that way.

We use our clever “ways of the world” to tolerate injustice at work or home, while populating our social media pages with opinions on the world around us. Whether it is the type of meat people choose to eat or the festival they like to celebrate or the language they would rather study in or the man or woman they would rather marry. We would prefer to keep our mouths shut and heads down when a female colleague is called “aggressive” just because she has an opinion; or turn a blind eye to the filth and squalor around us.

But what truly gets our blood boiling is a man eating the wrong kind of meat, thousands of miles away!
What is it that drives us to deliver this opinion — is it morality? A sense of righteousness to support what is right and speak up against what is wrong? Or is it fear? Is it the fear of life as we know it slipping out of our hands? Or pent up frustrations over the little things we let go of each day, little things that lie in larger human needs —freedom, dignity, justice, equality — those concepts so close to home yet so alien to everyday existence, reduced to concepts in books and constitutional parlance.

Fear and loathing
Maybe that’s why we are mad as hell. We are choosing the wrong battles and losing the war, and the casualties are our own souls — starved of those innate human rights that were supposed to be the pillars of our civilised society. Before religions etched out their boundaries, before the ideas of right and wrong filled our consciences, before democracies came into place or nations raised their flags, before even the constitutions and declarations that laid them out, the individual was still fighting for these innately human rights. Maybe we are mad because we stopped fighting for our basic needs — those fundamental and universal human values that give life direction and purpose.

Without these, we are bound to live in fear and anxiety, holding on to our dogmatism and lashing out at anything that seems to threaten it. But we humans are rational beings, with a mind capable of reflecting and contemplating over our actions. And if we do just that, we might realise what it is that we are truly mad about. Not some larger ideals, but those everyday instances we tolerated and just let go.

This article was originally published in the Hindu Business Line