Look, I was just following orders!

* A message from the past/present. A soldier if you will, but a human first. Like you and I. Gullible and powerful. The fantastic human condition.*

There I was caught underneath the rubble. There was all types of debris around me. Both physical and psychological. A heavy and solemn weight in every breath to take. It was the time to be dramatic, but all I could really feel was numb ( if you can even make that out to be a real feeling).

It has been written that hindsight is 20/20. Everything felt like a blur. Nothing was making sense, but it did at the time. Doesn't it always feel that way? At least, that is what I am telling myself seeing that I had already justified all actions beforehand. I saw friends and people of my stature doing the same things so I thought it was alright. I followed lemmings off the cliff simply because I felt it was the right thing to do...at the time.

When the status quo is begging you to join in because they are telling you to do the right thing, its easy to go along. You want that sense of belonging. It is built into us. If we resist, we tend to meet the scowls of the masses and shunned as a pariah of differing opinion. So I went along with it. I succumbed to the tide of popular opinion and direction. Once again, at the time it all made sense.

Things started out small. You do one small task that you are told and you try your best. You are rewarded. You feel a sense of community no matter how manufactured it may seem. After all we live in a constantly shifting culture. All cultures are contrived. All cultures create competing and similar morals and rules. Ex: Counterculture. A dance of opposites. A push and pull of extremes. The small tasks started to add up. Creating a structure of conformity and conditioning.

Like a frog in slowly warming pot, it doesn't realize it is boiling until it is too late. Too late to move and too late to exit the water that it once thought was comforting and warm. Its the gradual change that can catch us off guard. Hitting us when we least expect it. When you are running at full speed, it is harder to slow down, especially when a bunch of other people are running with you.

No one wants to be an outcast when you are just trying to get by. The validation of others can be an intoxicating drug and a distortion of one's sense of reality. There's a point where you must stand your ground and not think about the crowd in and out of our heads otherwise we fall prey to any external force. Good or bad. Rational or irrational.

By the time I got to the bigger tasks, I didn't really realize what I was doing. If you see a bunch of your friends stealing candy, it almost seems negligible in action. What harm would it cause if I just stole one more candy bar? Hey, everyone else was doing it, right? Not a sufficient excuse, but the mind can tend to trick you in times of passionate glee and excitement. We tend to rationalize the most ridiculous and heinous things after we have done it. Especially when we compare ourselves to others who have done equal or worse things. Your principles fade when you start moving blindly with a group that is doing things that seem justifiable or even meaningful in a big picture scenario.

We are more rationalizing creatures than rational creatures. 

Once you lie and get away with it, it becomes easier. Over time, the little lies start to morph into bigger ones. What more can we get away with? It's bad to lie to others, but when you lie to yourself you lose yourself. You become a shell of confusion and agitation. Running circles. A false and distorted image of one's self. Pretty soon you won't be able to tell the truth from fiction.

Living a lie creates a new enemy. An enemy you thought you could never be. 

The bigger actions seemed more tolerable within the group no matter how objectively wrong they could be conceived. After you have done all the little things and conditioned yourself over time to progressing in more extreme ways, you grow accustomed to the consequences. Think back on the frog in the pot. Think back on your teenage years of degeneracy and all the stupid mistakes you had to learn from. We act with what we know and what we don't know at the time. Who can you blame, but the past self who only knew what he knew at the time and acted on it?

It was all by design,
Molding into the ideal form,
A form of many,
A form of one.

When you trust someone or a group of people with a sense of authority, you are inclined to believe whatever they say. It's that building of trust and unity that hooks you in with a seductive lure. It just makes sense to follow orders when there is a somewhat clear path ahead. A path full of promise and communal praise. Do you know how much cognitive effort it takes to just think for yourself? And what are you really doing when you are doing that? There are some valuable traits to fulfilling the needs of self, but if you can supplement it with a rigid program that frees your mind from wandering thoughts and confusion, why not just follow something BIGGER than who you think you are? It can be a set of rules that lead to a set of behaviors. From those behaviors comes, habits and principles. Those then build up a structure of character. At the end of the day, what is the content of your character?

The leader gives out the orders. You follow the orders leaving you with no ambiguity. Everyone conforms. The cycle repeats and you are praised if you comply. Simple, eh? A recipe for strategic disaster. All by design. Cut and Dry.

Looking back at the things I have done, I can only learn from who I thought I once was. Lots of times it is too late to go back. To correct. To make things right. You can only go forward and not dwell or you will get caught in a spiral of shame and ignorance. When you lost your individuality to a group, you tend to lose your sense of wrong and right. It can turn your perception into a murky soup of subjectivity and moral relativity. You may have been a cog in the machine, but if you do the work of the group, you take responsibility for the group. All actions seem to bleed into your sense of self worth. A hive mind of incoherent action. The autonomous self gets stripped away. Dissolved into the collective.

It feels like an excuse just to say that I was following orders or that you were following orders. It was. I followed my friends off a cliff. The very thing that our mothers warned us about. When you are caught with a virus of conforming out of fear or meaning, you strip away who you are. Who you have always been deep down inside. You can tend to let things get out of hand. Oh, the mass temptation and delusion of crowds.

Little did we know that all of us were trained to follow orders in the first place. They broke us like horses in the public education system. Tried to mold us into productive little cogs in the wheel. None of them wanted to foster our natural talents. It was never in the plans. Just as long as you don't question the process, you will be fine. Seems simple enough. It just makes sense to merge with the crowd. If you show any resistance, you were reprimanded. We were trained to ask permission for everything. Even to go to the bathroom. Think about that.

What other things have we been conditioned to ask permission for?
To what authority do we bow to? To what set of rules do we blindly submit to? 

When you are conditioned at a young age, you're more susceptible to indoctrination. Any sense of resistance or change can tend to feel inconvenient when molded into a subservient human for years on end. People set a path out for you and you tend to blindly follow it. As if it is the right thing. Sometimes it might be the best plan. The best road map to navigate a world of uncertainty, suffering and existential angst. But when we feel dull and need escape, we try to wrestle out of our old ways. It is true that old habits die hard, but unlearning the way we have always been is a journey most are not willing to take.

But I(you) was obedient. A good follower of orders. A well oiled cog in the wheel. We all have been. Sometimes we follow orders because we are told. Sometimes we follow orders without realizing that we are following them in the first place.

I kept asking why. Why would I do all these things? What was I thinking? At that point, I know that I had grown. Regret and remorse can be painful, but they are there for a reason. Lessons to not repeat what you know know that you didn't know back then. At the end of the day, we can only do the best what we knew at the time no matter how irrational or ridiculous the actions seem to be.

The faded memories are there for a reason. Tools for moving into the future. A future of uncertainty with the certainty of mistakes. The certainty of learning the hard way until we really "get" it. One must use these tools wisely and be alert with caution, but not anxiety with what will happen next. It may make us cringe to look back on all of our embarrassing moments, but what blessing it is to actually learn and grow from. How we react to the memories is important. The most disastrous decisions I and you have made can be met with gratitude even when going into new battlefields. There is always a new opportunity to learn and grow as well as make mistakes. How comfortable are we with being aloof in moments of challenge and uncertainty? Do we get frustrated or anxious? How have we acted in the past? Does it matter? We are here now.

Well, the past seemed terrible, but you are here now. 

The great thing is that what has happened has happened and most of us made it out of alive. What are we holding onto that is preventing us from missing what is happening right before our eyes? Why hold onto things that have passed or illusions in our heads? Is it even worth the little time we have left?

What are you serving and where is it leading you?

* A loud burst is heard in the background. There are screams. It is hard to tell if they are real or not. The holes have been dug. It is time to get out.

DG