who do we think we are?

We say that who we are depends on who our friends is. How we interacted to the world around us. But these things still are dependent on who we are in the world. We cant see through race, even if we say we can. We cant see through language, even if we say we can. We cant see through nationality, even if we say we can. And we cant see through age even though we say we can. Sure, we are varied because of our interactions with other people and the world. We may be a race different from the common race in our country. We may not act our age but what we see in paper matters. Yes, there are people with a less cloudy perspective on equality but as I see it, there are more people that still are enslaved by their biases, prejudices and stereotypes. But then saying this, it is possible to infer that the world is uniformly like this. Like having one culture, as the hyperglobalist would like. It is like the matrix movie for the hyperglobalist, they want a global society where the limitation of geography ends.

There is this stand up comedian named Russel Peters said a joke about how everyone is racist, it is just that every race is racist in a different way. He would also joke a lot about how different people’s cultures vary that it is funny. The anti-globalist or the sceptics on the other hand want to preserve the differences in culture and does not want a unified culture for the whole world, preserving these identities like the jokes from Russel Peters.

One more approach in this matter is the transformationalists. For them, they want the cake on both parties. They want both hyperglobalist and anti-globalist. They would like to keep both the identity of the cultures and unify them at the same time. For me, this is particularly hard to understand because of the messy-ness. If one would look at where this would be going, one might say “who knows?” and maybe this is why they do it. At least here, a better future is possible.

In my opinion, who we are now, in this time, is a choice. We can now choose who we want to be because of technology. Like the movie surrogates, people can choose on how they would look like and this crossed barriers that can not have had been crossed ever did that not happen. But as the movie went, we might regret having this technology. This made me realize that who we are is imperfect, wanting perfection that we cant have, as we always want what we cant have. Ultimately, in the most basic sense, we are human.