Fighting The Hydra

An introduction

Most of us spend our time focused on the visible drama of the world: the arguments, the personalities, and the scandals that dominate the news. We argue about the actors on the stage of life while rarely asking who wrote the script or benefits from keeping the audience fixated on the performance. We see the puppets clearly enough, but we rarely see the strings, and almost never the hands that pull them. This is what I will be exploring in a series of posts in the coming weeks and months as I develop my thoughts on the issue of what I call the Hydras: The systems of power that we (as humanity) have created as a result of our inherent human nature and needs, and how these systems inevitably drift from their original useful purposes and end up controlling us rather than helping us.

I believe the stress and chaotic events around us have increased exponentially because the systems that shape modern life have themselves grown in scale, speed, and reach, making their effects more frequent, more intense, and harder to escape. Convenience has removed many of the pressures that once forced people to think seriously about survival, responsibility, and moral tradeoffs. The pace of change today leaves little time for reflection, and endless sources of distraction fill the gaps that silence and thought may once have occupied.

Little more than a century ago, much of daily life still revolved around staying alive, securing food, maintaining family and community, and navigating immediate physical risks, even here in the US. Today, for those in developed societies, survival has largely been abstracted away, replaced by an endless search for meaning, identity, and stimulation. At the same time, it is worth remembering that for much of the world, survival has never stopped being the central concern, which creates a widening gap in perspective that itself becomes a source of tension and conflict.

When morality is replaced by slogans and our attention fragments, people tend to fight over what they can see. They blame leaders, parties, corporations, or cultural groups, often with great passion and certainty, just as is being played out in the news daily. Sometimes these criticisms are legitimate, but often they are just fighting the symptoms rather than the causes.

Systems, by their nature, are harder to notice than individuals. They do not announce themselves, they normalize gradually, and they persist even when personnel changes. If we attack at the wrong level, focusing on people instead of structures, we exhaust ourselves without changing much of anything. What reform that is achieved is often shallow and short-lived, and is all too subject to change or reversal. Meet the new boss, just like the old boss.

In the coming posts, I will be exploring and expanding my thoughts on the topic of the hidden forces that control our lives. What they are, where they came from and why they persist. Like fish who cannot see the water they swim in, we are also largely blind to these forces until someone points them out to us. This is what I hope to do, for both you and me, in this series.