Recently, I’ve watched an interesting musical titled “The Guy who didn’t like musicals”. It was a classic hero’s journey — a meteor with aliens on board crashes into a theater, causing the creation of a brain-eating alien virus that makes people sing and dance before, well, eating your brain and turning you into part of a zombie hivemind. Now our hero, which is kind of immune against the virus out of pure spite and hatred against musicals, has to destroy the source which would kill of the virus and save his town and the world from extinction. Now, how is this related to anything at all, you might ask?
Well, here comes the important part. One of the characters, simply titled “the professor”, is this crazy doomsday prepper who helps out the other characters by giving them shelter. Whilst the main character is off saving his best friend’s daughter, the professor finds out that if the source of the virus — the meteor — is destroyed, the virus would cease to exist. After finding this out, he ends up overwhelming the other two characters still in his safehouse and ties them up, playing music to attract the infected musical zombies so that they would eat his and their brains. His reason? He realizes that this hivemind virus, if spread to the whole world, would bring true unity and peace (Spoiler: that doesn’t work out quite that well for him and his brains get eaten).
I’ve found it quite interesting that he ended up being the only character with that kind of mindset. Yeah it’s not the best idea, but in my opinion he was kind of right.
This sat in the back of my mind until I’ve read the Inauguration speech by President Joe Biden. Sadly, he doesn’t talk about brain-eating zombie viruses, just the Coronavirus pandemic (which is a start I guess). Aside from that, the main topic of his speech is unity again. Biden describes how in such a crisis, in the past the American people (yee-haw) solved this through unity. I mean, in an extremely polarized two-party system where people start arguing about right and wrong in highly complicated and diverse topics unity is not something we see. But Biden is right. Most political issues in modern-day America arise from the extreme polarization and lack of unity.
Funnily enough, what Biden says about the past is not entirely true. Let me introduce you to ✨the civil war ✨, which I’d argue there wasn’t a whole lot of unity — you know, it being a civil war. Even in the days when America was fighting britain and Washington was supreme commander, there were pistol duels between soldiers and even higher-ranked officers and generals.
Let’s do a little imagining — picture we had perfect, worldwide unity. Wars and armed conflicts? What’s that? Climate change? Solved some time, with global collaboration and basically unlimited resources such a problem is much more approachable. There would be no such thing as a Trump pulling out of climate contracts. Bullying and harrassment? Why? That’s fundamentally against the principle of unity, you know, excluding someone. One could say, true unity would solve basically all our problems. It’s basically would be the single most significant factor in a utopian society.
Snap back to reality (oh, there goes gravity). We have problems. Lots of them. I would say, the only thing we have in abundance is problems. Why? Because people suck. A person can be reasoned with. A person is mostly rational. But people? People bring chaos. People can’t be controlled nor reasoned with. People are irrational. Maybe unity can be achieved partially, but never truly. There will always be multiple opinions. Multiple parties that need to collaborate. There is no perfect solution, only compromises.
Alright, here comes the big “however”. Like I said, unity would be the singular most important factor in an ideal society. We can’t achieve true unity, but we can achieve it partially. With it being such an important factor, that is what we must do. Because (and this is not supporting him generally, just in this one aspect) Biden is right. We must try to unite ourselves as much as we can.
Ideas like the European Union work. But true unity comes from within. It’s not a political contract, it’s a social norm. As with most things, it all relies on the people (did I mention people suck), which is why there is a severe lack of unity. (I realized I forgot to mention capitalism. I also blame capitalism. But people still suck. I’ll still include it in the title.)
Anyways, that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Because I’m a person, and in case you’re reading this you’re (probably) a person too. So start small. Be kind. Be tolerant. Be the change.