Do you recognise yourself?

Would you do something great if you knew nobody would ever know? Would you find the cure for cancer and share it without putting your name on it? According to many philosophers (Hegel being the most adamant on this subject) we don’t do anything unless we are going to get recognition for it. We want to see ourselves and the changes we make in the world, and in fact we won’t put much effort in if we don’t expect that anyone will know. Does this sound like you?

Like the Marxist traditional thinking, we find it difficult to work unless we can see the contribution that our work makes in the world. We want to see ourselves reflected in our product or we feel alienated and distanced from ourselves and others. This is where we are now in 2010. Everyone goes to work, not talking to each other in the tube because they feel that not only are others strangers, but they are strange. They are somehow different and our constant focus on being ourselves makes others at once more strange. They can’t be us. It is difficult to see yourself reflected in most modern capitalist work, or in any other element of this Africo-Western blend that is SA. Is that why we don’t do more?

Do you go to work and do an average job because you know at the end of the day the big boss isn’t going to know that it was you who added the flair to the campaign or set that extra stone into the wall to make it just perfect? Under=performance is hugely common. Most people get by with just getting by and it is only a select few that continuously try to push the boundaries. Are you one of them? If not why?

Watch others the next time you see someone giving money to a beggar or a person in need. Their faces generally light up, illuminated from within because they think that they have made a change. Watch them watching the other person and trying to measure the level of the change they have made. They imagine a future change for this person and recognise themselves in this future. A little bit of self-affirmation, for a relatively low price. There are other ways to do this if you can’t bare the guilt when you don’t give, or if you don’t like to give money for fear that the future you’ve created is one that feeds a habit.

Do you recycle? Unlikely. Why? Other than the primary reason most people cite which is that it is too much effort, it is probably more likely because you don’t believe in your heart that it will make a difference. If you did you would do it. You don’t see your little bit of plastic being re-used. So what do you see? When you don’t recycle this is the picture for you to see. See a trench in the ocean. See the fish that live in that trench, their niche in the environment. See a foreign substance — that’s you in the form of plastic. If you look a little closely at the fish you’ll notice that part of their body has become plastic, because its part of their ecosystem, part of their food. It poisons them.

So if you want to do more, to feel yourself recognised in the world today, then recycle. Stop whining about the effort and the difficulty finding the polystyrene recycling place, because if you don’t recycle the only thing you’ll be able to recognise of yourself in the world is destruction.