Translator: 재용 조 Reviewer: Ivana Krivokuća
It's true.
(Laughter)
Friends, 20 years ago,
I suffered
what could be described as a severe reality check.
I was working in the ex-Yugoslavia,
with a bunch of colleagues and friends,
to try and find a way of building a better future
of peace, justice, and security,
following a war of horrendous scale and scope,
a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people,
and displaced many more.
I've spared you the images and left you a grey, blank slide
largely because I don't want to see those images again.
I never want to see those images again as long as I live.
And sadly,
you probably don't have to see those images to get the picture.
So what did I make of this reality check,
this voyage into the darkness,
this view of the horrors of human existence?
Actually, I came up with two questions.
The first question is quite obvious:
how is it that people are able to kill,
maim, and die
for an identity than to an outsider, even a trained anthropologist like me,
is minuscule?
Small difference in language, a small difference in cultural practices,
maybe a slightly bigger difference in belief systems,
but not much to an outsider.
The second question that struck me,
that really threw me,
- and it's quite an unusual question, I think -
is how is it that people are able to push towards meaning
even in the most unimaginable of circumstances,
even walking through the most horrific of lives?
How is it that we keep striving forwards, keep finding meaning?
And I thought these questions were poles apart,
but over the years and thinking about it,
I realized that these are just two sides of the same coin.
On the one side, we have that immense human capacity
to find and build meaning wherever we go;
that drive, that insistence, that persistence.
Sadly, on the other side,
we have that horror of losing meaning,
and when that meaning is attached to identity,
we'll do anything to protect it.
So, thinking about that,
I came up with a hypothesis.
I'm an anthropologist, we like hypothesisisis.
(Laughter)
And I also came up with that graphic.
I'm an anthropologist, not a graphic artist.
(Laughter)
My argument is this:
we as a species
are absolutely addicted to meaning.
And like most addicts,
eventually we come to the point
where is not the thrill of the addiction
that drives us,
it's the aversion of that horrible cold turkey,
the withdrawal symptoms of not having it.
So my contention is
that one of the defining traits of how we construct our reality
is through the lens of this aversion to meaninglessness.
So, how did we get here?
I came by car, but...
(Laughter)
My ancestors, and our ancestors may have looked something like this,
and at some point,
one of them would have solved a problem.
Whether that is a problem of how to hunt,
how to make a tool,
how to build a relationship with another group.
And they would've communicated it.
And the other person, the other early human,
would have refined it, made it better,
and the people who are better at managing meaning,
at communicating it, and transmitting it,
they lived to fight another day.
If you knew the symbol for "big, hairy tiger coming that way",
you are more likely to survive.
Evolution made basic and stupid, right.
(Laughter)
Next slide.
I love this image.
It can look a little cheesy,
but in it is everything that I want to talk to you about.
If you look on the left,
you see our ancestor
cutting away at a piece of meat,
using a tool,
preparing something to be shared.
That is a practical kind of meaning.
It's understanding how to use a tool,
how to use the world around you to your benefit.
You see the people in the middle?
One is sharing food with another.
They're building a relationship.
In anthropological terms, the sharing of food, we call it "commensality".
They're building a relationship,
a social relationship around that.
And whereas with practical meaning,
if we can't figure out how to use that tool,
we swear, hit our thumb, kick it, throw it around.
With social meaning, when we are excluded,
when we're pushed aside, outside our community,
we feel that fundamental angst; that sense of loneliness.
And you'll see in the middle of the fire,
- and I think this fire is a beautiful, beautiful analogy -
if you look into the flames you can imagine,
that fire allowed us to cook our food,
to eat stuff that we may have not otherwise been able to eat,
to expand, to move,
to grow healthier, stronger, fitter, have more children, and spread.
That fire is also a source of warmth.
It's also a source of protection, of comfort.
You can imagine, in the background, you see the sun setting.
Maybe they are having, or are about to have, an early TEDx talk.
(Laughter)
And they're saying,
"Where does the sun go?
Does the sun die?
Is the sun reborn?"
Maybe they're thinking,
"We die; what happens to us after we die?"
At that moment,
we come to that fundamental,
ultimate question of meaninglessness;
what lies on the other side of the sunset of our lives?
That sounded like a soap opera then.
(Laughter)
Sunset of our lives;
what lies on the other side?
And what happens afterwards?
So there we have this idea of existential meaning,
and existential meaninglessness that philosophers like to talk about.
We are wonderful at building fire,
but I see hope in this fire.
I do not see fear.
Why?
Because I've got another brilliant graphic to show you.
I see our construction of self and reality as sitting in the middle of a triangle.
On the one side we have meaning generated by ideas.
And if we think of that great period of proliferation,
of nuclear weaponry, the cold war,
we can see that was a war of ideas.
You had communism on the one side,
and on the other side you had capitalism and democracy.
It was a war of ideas,
never fought with nuclear weapons, thank heavens.
But because it was a war of ideas,
between ideas, eventually ideas can change,
be managed, be manipulated,
lose currency, gain currency.
So now when we look to Russia and the former Soviet Union
and other communist countries in the world,
in most cases we're seeing a change.
We've seeing a reduction in the cold war mentality,
but where we haven't,
we can see that it's based around that other axis;
meaning and identity.
This is one of the main points I want to make to you.
When we avoid meaninglessness by clinging to identity,
there is nothing you can do to kill that,
to remove it by attacking identity.
Identity is the Hydra.
When you attack identity directly,
the only thing that will happen is it will grow more heads,
and come back at you.
If, and if, we try and move it
towards the side of ideas,
you engage identity with ideas,
then maybe then you can make some headroom.
But you'll never get anywhere.
And I tell you this; you know that ideas are threatening
because you know that the people who most use identity
to dominate their people,
to argue for extremism,
for radicalism, for murder,
they are the people who seek ignorance,
they are the people who shelter their people from ideas.
So how do we reconstruct reality?
Well, the first thing I'd like is someone to redo my graphic.
hat would be nice.
Well, I'd like this.
First off, I'd like you to take this idea;
this idea that we are driven by an aversion to meaninglessness.
I want you to take that idea.
I want you to play with it, kick it around, break it, change it.
If it's useless, that's fine.
The second thing I'd like you to do is take care.
Listen to the discourse of identity,
listen for that,
because nothing positive and creative ever comes out of that,
only death will follow.
So listen for people saying,
"This was them, this was us,
this happened to us, they did this."
When you hear that dialogue and that discourse,
you know that you're entering into the realm of identity.
And I'd like you to take heart.
We are a species that has a great capacity for violence,
we are a species that has a great capacity for hate.
But we are also the species that developed the idea of peace,
of unity, of hope.
My suggestion is this:
take heart,
and whenever confronted
by a negative identity, whenever confronted by hate,
respond with ideas, respond with hope,
with peace, with justice.
Only then, and hopefully eventually
we'll see the kind of peaceful and just world that we all deserve.
I thank you for your time,
I thank you for your kind consideration.
I wish you peace,
I wish you meaning, but not too much,
(Laughter)
and I wish you a wonderful evening.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)