Revolution Through Decency

Holding onto our humanity in a world that tries to pull us apart.

Scar tree by the Gulpa Creek - Yorta Yorta land

We live in a time of humiliation, anger and meanness, where all these things have become a form of social currency. In a world like this, being merely decent feels like a revolutionary act.

Social media, in its truest viral forms, has been clawing away at us now for close to a quarter of a century; platforms that pretend to draw us closer together have done more than almost anything else in that time to push us further apart.

Like nightfall on a short August day, these online pretences have become so woven into our lives that our very sense of self is sometimes hard to distinguish between the binary computation world, and the far more complex reality of the everyday.

As we step in and out of these dimensions, we can easily forget that in the everyday world people are, in the main, kind and courteous. Think of times someone has accidentally bumped into you in a supermarket aisle and profusely apologised, the times you’ve witnessed someone give up their seat on public transport for someone of senior years or the genuine care of healthcare staff inside a hospital in our worst moments.

In the social media era, witnessing or partaking in these genuine acts of kindness can make you feel unusual or out of place, when in fact these gestures and actions are normal acts of decency; they are not countercultural but increasingly feel that way. Things, that despite the best attempts of the worst of us, have helped us to thrive and develop into functional societies.

I write pieces like this to try and reorientate my own thoughts. I find myself endlessly scrolling through the doom and gloom, the pile-ons, the trouncing of others. I find myself pent up with anger and frustration born out of a sense of helplessness over the nightly news, exasperated over a lame piece of analysis or disgusted with myself for taking the bait that was laid for me in a post specifically designed to enrage me, to reduce me into something far smaller.

Yet away from screens and the algorithms that light them up, this is not the case. The world is full of people trying to do their best for themselves and the people they love with what they have. They do it with kindness and consideration, not free of frustration or the pain of the world, but they press on with decency, and if possible, are willing to help others outside their immediate circle.

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There used to be a quaint notion that governments, or at least democratically elected governments, existed ostensibly to improve the lives of the citizenry, that in a world full of problems, some seen and some unforeseen, government with the trust and resources we place in its institutions, would act to address these problems.

We now have governments and systems infiltrated, some would say infested, by political movements and their operatives, spawned of the rage stoked and curated by the malevolent and propagated by machines. This type of politics is designed to troll the broader populace in the hope that what crumbles around us will fall on their side of the political ledger.

We too must take responsibility for the state of things. Perhaps we’ve outsourced too much of our sense of agency to outside forces like governments and the ecosystems that feed them. We give our agency to these institutions and then wait for someone else to restore “social cohesion” or rebuild the integrity in systems which have for so long let us down. We forget that much of the work in keeping this place going, to holding society together, takes place between us.

This doesn’t absolve governments of the many injustices they perpetrate and oversee. The apathetic malaise with which they address issues such as Indigenous incarceration, environmental policy or growing inequity, to name a random few, is a way of entrenching the interests of the vested and the means by which to control the rest of us.

We must thunder against the harm done to us through government at the behest of vested interests. Democracy is something we must tend to. Like boiling oil on a stovetop, we dare not walk away from it. We retain a keeper’s eye to ensure the pot doesn’t boil over and engulf us. When it comes to these things, to aid us, we must orientate ourselves within the many small worlds in our reach. Worlds full of people and places that make life more than just bearable, for it is inside these microcosms that we gain the strength to rail.

But for some segments of society, that buffer between the comfort of community and the fight ahead is thin. For others, it doesn’t exist.

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We are reminded of this thin line today on International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Here in Australia, First Peoples have set up entire sectors for ourselves to pad that buffer between the intolerable forces from outside and the sheer joy and strength that comes from taking care of our own. Maintaining the cushion is relentless. Progress is slow and if it stagnates or regresses, the loss is generational.

Perhaps that is the point. In a world that constantly prods us towards alienation, away from each other, we need places where the temperature drops and the realisation is that these places are everywhere around us and they are nourishing. The care and love of those in the world we create for ourselves, do not remove us from the larger fight ahead of us, nor should they. In this, decency is less resistance and more a pool in which we can dip into to restore ourselves.

Giving up our seat to someone on a tram isn’t going to solve global warming, recognising the selfless dedication and care of a nurse isn’t going to fix the problems within our health system, and being courteous to others at the supermarket isn’t going to reduce the cost of living. But these things, in both the receiving and the giving, will do something else that is of tremendous importance: they will remind us of our own humanity at a time when it is under attack from people and movements that want to strip it away from us.

If the simple acts of decency feel revolutionary, they’re not. It’s how we hold onto our humanity in an unreal world.