The Rudest Book Ever

by Shwetabh Gangwar

  There are a host of narratives present in this world. We all follow a few. The most prominent ones would have to be: Our nation is the greatest. Our religion is the greatest. Our culture is the best. Our nation is going to be the greatest if we could get rid of a few people. This other nation is our enemy. This group of people is violent. Our culture is under threat. This group of people is inferior. Science is evil. And on and on.

  They are not even complicated. Just remember the script:

  It uses and twists historical data selectively to suit the narrative.

  It uses and twists present-day information to create an aura of fear or anger.

  It uses your feelings.

  It uses an ideal scenario, either one from the past or in the future.

  It capitalises on your lack of data and facts.

  Lastly, convincing, charismatic voices and figures are used as spokespersons.

  For example, take ‘our nation is the greatest’, put it through the script, and the narrative built is:

  Our nation used to be the greatest.

  The nation is not the greatest anymore.

  Don’t you want the nation and people to rise again?

  We will rise and prosper if we did this or that, for example, elect this person.

  Here are all the people, political parties and nations we can blame for our current situation.

  Lastly, politicians, news anchors, celebrities, lawyers, social media personalities are used as spokespersons.

  You are highly influenced by whichever narratives you follow. And it doesn’t matter if it is right wing or left wing or whatever—they all use the same pattern. Facts and logical reasoning isn’t left or right wing, nor do they give a shit about ideology. So, if you think you practice reasoning and common sense, you wouldn’t give a fuck about ideology and narratives either. You’d find shit on both sides. The question is: do you?

  YOUR PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IS NOT THE BEST TEACHER

  You change the way you think from your personal experiences as well. A good experience might shape your entire perception of that thing or person in a positive light. Similarly, a bad experience can do the opposite. The truth is, they are not the greatest teachers. The perceptions you may create from personal experiences are very limited in data, highly dependent on your environment, and may exist only in your personal reality. That is incomplete and highly unreliable data.

  For example, in the beginning of a relationship, when everything is going great, your perception of people in general might become, people are great, life is so great. But if you are left or cheated on by a person, your perception might become: everybody is selfish. All men are assholes. All women are gold-diggers.

  Another example is, when people travel to a country they have never been to before, and because of a good experience, they form the perception, people of this country are very nice. They are just great. That is a generalisation based on your personal experience. Someone else’s experience might be the opposite of yours.

  Therefore, such learning tends to become easy to recruit by narratives and ideologies. For example, if you have had a bad personal experience with foreigners, you might join the narrative that ‘foreigners are bad’ and generalise. If you had good experiences, then you might join ‘foreigners are great’, and also generalise. Simple common sense will tell you: they are just people.

  When it comes to your personal experiences, try to remind yourself that they have not taught you everything you need to know. The world doesn’t revolve around you, so there’s a huge possibility that your interpretations may be wrong; that maybe you don’t know everything about it; or maybe you don’t know anything about it at all. It’s not a bad place to be—to not know about something. You can find out more about anything only when you admit to yourself that you don’t know.

  WHEN YOU ABANDON THE WAY YOU CURRENTLY THINK

  Just to remind you, here’s an example of how you may think right now:

  When you are asked a question that requires your point of view, your mind immediately starts looking for all the packets of information that you may have on the topic. You might remember interviews you watched, in which a person gave an answer to the same question. You may remember a podcast that dealt with the same question. Once you recall these, you give your answer with great confidence.

  These recorded answers and stolen perceptions—even though they may convince and impress others—prevent you from thinking and creating your own perceptions. As impressive as they may be, they are not yours. Also, because they are not yours, they largely remain unapplied in your day-to-day life.

  ‘How to think’ requires two things:

  Abandonment of all the packets of information or perceptions you may have collected so far.

  Getting to know or finding out by relying on data and thinking.

  By rejecting all these packets of information, you are training yourself to think on your own. It is also accepting that a lot of your previously held views might have been one sided.

  When you were a follower, you stopped seeing data as data; instead you got stuck with wondering, what narrative does this data serve? This made you purposely ignore information that challenged the narrative you followed.

  You started viewing it as a war between my narrative—which is good—and the other—which is evil. You became so caught up with this idea that every time real data was presented to you that could have impacted your perceptions, the first thing you cared about was the source: which website is this from? Therefore, data became unimportant, facts become secondary; the source became everything. If the source was in the list of enemy narratives, the data became bullshit, even if it contained facts supported by evidence. This is right-wing propaganda. That is liberal propaganda. This made your perceptions one-sided, controlled and chosen by the narratives.

  Once you free yourself from all narratives and the packets of information, and seek only data, you realise how much you had closed yourself to learning and developing your thinking.

  DATA IS A MIND-FUCKER

  If you can look at data objectively, it has the power to completely change, improve, or destroy all your previous perceptions and ways of thinking. Here’s an example of how data fucks with your mind: If you heard a common problem about marriage, you may think you have a solution because you have heard of this before. But as you get more and more information, you would see the problem becoming more complex, very emotional and very human. With new data, you may realise your older solution doesn’t apply anymore.

  The point is: your perceptions can always be challenged by new data. Our thinking relies entirely on whatever we know at present, which means we don’t know much about anything. New data can come in any day and change that, or confirm it.

  Another example of this is: when you see a couple for the first time, you may form a perception of their relationship and who they are. Later, with more data, you may realise your previous perception was completely wrong.

  YOU ALWAYS STAY AT NOTHING AS A THINKER

  In a way, ‘how to think’ becomes a continuing, never-ending struggle to know with certainty. By never-ending, I don’t mean that you won’t be able to solve anything. Of course, you will develop many perceptions, theories and impressive patterns of solving things. What it means is, you will always remain in doubt; you will always remain a student, and data will be your teacher forever. Even if you have theories that work and explain something wonderfully, you would be fully prepared to toss them aside for a better one.

  You will have accepted that you actually don’t know for sure, for two reasons:

  There is always new data that could render your explanations inapplicable.

  Your explanations are the best that your mind could come up with at this moment.

  This keeps you humble and hungry. This also sharpens your mind more as you try to surpass yourself by coming up with a better explanation. For this, you consume more data, fill your mind with knowledge, and build better theories from it. You
are unlike those who think they know everything. You can obviously destroy them in a debate; but, in your mind, you put yourself at nothing, and therefore remain a learner.

  HOW TO BUILD SOLUTIONS AND PERCEPTIONS

  Once you have abandoned ‘what to think’, in the beginning, you will feel clueless. It’s the same cluelessness that you felt as a kid when looking at an elaborate puzzle for the first time. You do not know a pattern with which to solve it immediately. But once you believe you can do it and take up the challenge, you end up solving it. Three things happen afterwards:

  The second time you solve the same puzzle, you might end up solving it in a different way from the first time. Your memory may have failed to capture all the steps in your first success, so you can’t repeat them. But, after several repetitions, you would learn to solve the puzzle with some definite patterns. Similarly, as you apply your thinking to solve a problem or create your perception of something, you would, by repetitions, at some point discover a few patterns which would loyally serve your mental faculties in solving similar puzzles in an efficient manner.

  These patterns might not solve all puzzles.

  The more elaborate the problem, the more evolved the patterns are forced to become. The same applies to perceptions. With an issue that has more complexities, you might have to rethink the entire pattern.

  Most of all, ‘how to think’ means allowing the data to make you think; not your preconceived notions dictating to you how to feel about data. You learn only when you are open to learning. To develop how to think, you would have to focus on the contents of the problem with absolute disregard for your personal judgements, biases and prejudices. Only then can a new pattern and a new understanding take birth.

  How to think differently is an ability that has to be personally developed by you with your own thinking. You’re going to come up with your own patterns. This doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have existed before; it would mean that the patterns you have come up with would serve you the most and the best.

  And now we move on to the last chapter.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A FEW SIMPLE THINGS TO NEVER FORGET

  LEARN TO SPOT BULLSHIT FROM A MILE AWAY

  There are people who can sense bullshit of any kind from a mile away—that should be your goal. This means, when you are watching news or being sold anything, you are able to separate data from the narrative. Not to forget, narratives too have data about how people collectively think and how to make people think something they weren’t thinking before. By studying narratives without getting recruited, you are able to locate the exact spot where the salesperson uses or twists the data, makes an emotional appeal to the viewer, and guides them on how to feel about the information.

  From now on, look at all narratives as sources that have nothing to do with you. You can learn from them, agree with their analysis if it matches yours, entertain yourself with their theatrics, but never assume that they speak for you. You alone speak for yourself.

  SOLVE YOUR OWN FUCKING PROBLEMS

  This does not mean you should solve all of your problems at once or only when it has become so big that you can’t sleep anymore, it’s giving you panic attacks, you can’t focus on anything else in your life, and you have started to call yourself a fucking idiot a lot.

  This means that you have to solve your problems because you have to develop the mindset of seeing any problem, any red flag, any concern as something that needs to be dealt with immediately, regardless of whether it is minor or major, in the present or with the potential to occur in the future. The mindset of problem-solving recognises that problems are meant to be solved, acknowledges that a problem is a sign of something not working out, and builds the habit of solving them at the first sight of their presence.

  Problem-solving should be a habit, not the last resort. If you considered the number of problems in your life currently sharing the status of being unsolved and your general approach to dealing with them, you would realise how far you have strayed from the course of developing your mind. The more problems you solve, the more you would know about yourself—and that’s why you need to solve every last one of them.

  Here’s another thing, there is a chance that a lot of your problems might be coming from a source called fascination. Most problems created from this source come from its chief productions called comparing, envying, aspiring and desiring. So a lot of you are busy finding solutions to problems that don’t even exist. You are creating them because you haven’t been humbled by practical reality. You still live in the fantasy world.

  For example, a person in a fine relationship comparing it with relationships of other people; comparing your partner with other people or someone you follow online; and from that, finding flaws in your relationship and the partner. That is a person looking to create problems because reality is not a romantic-comedy movie to them.

  How can this be solved? By thinking and asking yourself, what is the source of my problem? And when you find out that it’s your stupid insatiable fascinations and desires, you get to ask yourself, why am I so obsessed with this perfect life, with these fascinations and desires?

  It’s a deep question. It will make you think and question the nature of fascinations; you will realistically ask if they are even practically achievable, or are they just an unending struggle that keeps updating itself no matter how close you come to it?

  And that is why it is most important that you solve your problems, because only by this habit do you come to find and spot real problems, distinguish between real problems and problems that don’t exist. In short, the more you engage in solving your problems, the easier it becomes to locate the exact source of why you might be creating problems that do not exist.

  IT’S ALL RIGHT TO FEEL PAIN

  There are no great secrets hiding behind the doors of happiness, except that everything is great and is supposed to be great for you to remain happy. That is called a ‘safe’ life, and also an uninformed scared life.

  You find out a lot about life, yourself, and others when you don’t mind stepping outside of feeling happy. You find out what your limitations are, what you can take, what you can come back from, and what you can become. None of that can be learned and actualised by wishing to be safe and happy all the time.

  You need to accept that experiences that are going to be highly unpleasant, disturbing and painful are going to come into your life. There are people who don’t expect these things to ever happen to them, so they feel like victims when it does. In their minds, they feel like they never deserved to go through this. They see such experiences as happiness being robbed from them. Therefore, their conclusions and concerns float around who to blame and what to blame. How dare this happen to me?

  Meanwhile, a person who doesn’t mind feeling other things understands they are not alone in experiencing such shit. People go through this every day. It’s nothing new. So, the focus remains in solving it and learning from it as much as possible.

  In short, you have to accept that you are human. You will go through it all. You will at some point be ripped off, betrayed, taken advantage of, lied to, cheated on, defeated, laughed at, and treated unfairly. And at some point, you will make someone else feel a lot of these things too—no matter how good a person you tell yourself you are. There are also going to be times in which you will feel absolutely shitty about yourself. You may think you are lonely, ugly, unwanted, a loser, and basically a piece of shit.

  The truth is, they are just emotions. You can go through them if you simply allow their presence in your mind. You should know that it’s okay. It’s okay to feel those things. Don’t plan your escape, let them hit you. They will make you think. They will make you aware of the sources of the pain—both inside and outside. Isn’t that how we learned to distinguish between what’s safe and otherwise as children? Why do you want to stop that education? You will become wiser by acknowledging your vulnerabilities, not by covering them up with distractions. Allow yourself to feel pain
and acknowledge it with respect, not fear. That’s all the ointment pain needs—acceptance—and from then on, it starts to subside.

  Allow yourself to feel pain, not because you can’t help it, but because it has earned that place. You made a decision that brought pain to you. Don’t fight it. Look at the decision which opened that door. That pain could be a reminder of how much you opened yourself to somebody. Fear would advise you to close yourself, never to trust again—that is the lesson of a fear of pain. If you have been betrayed, your reasoning would simply make the process of gaining entry harder—that is the lesson of pain.

  When you ask, All right, what’s the solution? Your focus goes directly to the problem, not feelings. Therefore, your reasoning takes charge, not your crumbled state of emotions. And when your reasoning is in charge, you gradually discover several truths.

  NEVER COMPARE YOURSELF TO ANYBODY

  You are you. The more time you spend learning and trying out what makes others happy and what others do to seem impressive and cool, the more time you are wasting. Ultimately, all that is going to matter is knowledge of your self—that is the only thing which will make sense, and the only thing that will give you any satisfaction in life, regardless of your age, what your net worth is, and what your relationship status is. The knowledge of you is what matters. If you don’t realise this now, time will eventually make sure you find out about it, but then it may become too late.

  You are not them. If they are ahead of you, don’t make them your enemy, nor become their follower simply because you may not want to go where they are going. Both competition and being a follower have the tendency to corrupt your original motivation to do that thing. The world does not know you, so it will sell you what it sells to everybody. You might not know yourself either, so you will assume it will make you happy. Therefore, never be too sure of what is being sold to you. They are usually things that are meant to shut your reasoning down and blindly make you chase after things. We have talked about it already: advertising, assumptions, fascinations, remember? They can’t work on you if you know what you want and what you don’t want. The same applies to comparisons. If you know what you want in life, then you wouldn’t care about what others have.