The Spaghetti Principle

I’ve come up with a theory about humanity. Not you, not me, not the whole whoppin’ city of Bangalore, but of the human race in general.

I believe that humans like being divided.

When it comes down to country versus country, you root for yours, with your whole heart.

But then, when they pit states against each other, you forget the love for your whole country, and it shrinks to your state.

And then the cities compete, and lo and behold, your stately love, too, is gone, but it’s there for your city, at least.

Flash forward past districts, schools, families, and then it comes down to the biggest bullfight of all. Person versus person. And at that moment you only care about yourself.

Because that’s the maximum extent of your love, after all. You can only truly love yourself. Because your allies on the larger scale are more distant, and should push come to shove, you would happily turn on them as well.

Charles Darwin once proposed a theory on evolution. “Survival of the fittest,” he had said. And survival of the fittest indeed, for your priority would be yourself.

But I believe that, in the bigger picture, it’s more than just the primitive instinct of survival. It’s also the feeling you get, the knot you can’t quite untangle, when you’re part of something exclusive. You like being in on a secret. You like inside jokes, at least the ones where you’re part of the inside. You like being chosen for something not everyone else is, being a part of it.

Tons of world activists have advocated for peace, for love, for unity above all else, but people are too busy feeling special to notice.

We tell ourselves that we only stay divided because we’re powerless, but I don’t believe that. We’re humans. We’re the race that invented talking metal that spawns our face halfway across the world. We’re the folks who’re overfilled with creativity, with intelligence, with determination. We can do whatever we please. But we don’t want to.

We’re divided by haphazard lines on a piece of paper, partitions that have killed thousands, borders that have displaced millions, walls that have torn families in half. But that isn’t what scares me. What scares me is the fact that we like it. We like pushing our patriotism towards the world. We like going to borders and jeering at the other side. We like pretending that we’re far superior to any other place, but surprise, surprise, we aren’t always.

You know what? Forget countries. We divide ourselves in so many ways. Religion, age group, friends, gender, status, ideology, drawing so many cracks between ourself and the others that we’ve singled ourselves out all alone to our lonely little islands.

That is why we love only ourselves.

I believe that humans like being divided.

Am I wrong?

But at the same time, I want to be.

I want to believe that there’s hope.

And I do.

I believe with all my heart that our differences make us stronger, more versatile, better than the ‘us’ we were yesterday.

I believe that we can fix ourselves.

And I want you to believe that too.

Because if we believe in what seems like such a grandiose notion, such a far-off dream, we can drag it into reality.

I don’t say we need to fill the cracks. Our islands make us special. But I do say we need to build bridges between them. Sturdy bridges, made to last.

My aforementioned point on the humans’ resourcefulness and grit seems to be turned in my favour.

We are humans.

We do impossible things for fun.

And we can do this.

No, we will.