Psychology is being weaponized for profits.

What do I mean? Please read carefully.

We all have noticed that the mobile phone has made it easy to avoid despair? Common sense would say, how is it bad if people are happy. They would say avoiding despair is a good thing. But, to be really happy, we have go beyond common sense and study deeper.

19th century Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard - widely accepted as the father of Existentialism - writes, 'in despair, one finds the truth of one’s own self. Only by facing despair can one understand life deeply.'

For example, if a college student gets low marks in Mathematics -

1) Despair comes. But then, by habit, he watches a few reels on his phone, it brings a smile and he avoids the despair.

2) To face despair, one needs time alone, time with family, time with teachers, time with friends. But the content (reels etc) on the mobile phone does not allow that introspection to fructify.

3) As a result, we cannot go deep into any issue. When did you last spent a considerable time on a problem, a question or a confusion? You will find that most of us haven’t.

As a society, we have lost the temperament to read books. Most of my friends who were avid readers can’t read today. Reading a book is an evolved deeper relationship, which can be compared to going deeper into a problem.

4) When we avoid despair, our hopes shrink. We become momentary, satisfied with small, safe goals. On this path, we never feel the deeper existential questions. We try to pass life with immediate answers.

Despair stays hidden.

Despair becomes a sickness that does not know that it is sick. Such a sickness hides itself, but it never heals, it only grows. One day it takes the form of severe mental pressure.

THIS DESPAIR IS BEING WEAPONISED

Let’s not go into WHO. But just try to understand the concept. Let’s say X.

X produces content or creates an ecosystem of content creation where the content is exciting, entertaining, humourous, erotic, shocking, revealing, adventurous, fantastic, unbelievable, quick answers, and most importantly short.

X creates a situation when these content are seen and they hide all other content. Let’s take Facebook. Around 10 years back, we mostly saw posts by our friends and family. It was a social / family network. Today, it is not. You mostly see feeds by content creators. Almost all viral reels that you see and engage are not made by your family and friends. They are made by content creators - a relatively small set of companies and individuals who are or can be controlled by X's power or X's money.

These content are not only making us dull but also its prisoners. The mind takes the form of whatever content you are consuming the most. In despair, there is no freedom of thought. Kierkegaard wrote that despair is a paralysis of the self that strips away true agency. In his view, despair is a "misrelation" where the mind becomes a "cage".

Kierkegaard famously observed that people often clamour for freedom of speech as a distraction from the fact that they rarely use their freedom of thought.

Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche too believed that “mass-conformity” (which he saw as a form of despair) prevented true independent thought. He famously noted that in a state of spiritual sickness, one may lose the creative power to generate original thoughts.

DESPAIR AND THE SPIRIT OF LIFE

Like Kierkegaard who wrote that ‘in despair, one finds the truth of his spirit’, Jean-Paul Sartre argued that despair is the moment you realize you cannot rely on anything external. While this feels like a loss of freedom, he argued that it is actually the threshold to true mental liberation because it forces you to take total responsibility for your own thoughts and values.

But if X makes you avoid despair, you do not get the chance to understand your spirit - your infinity, your possibility.

About the loss of ‘possibility’, Kierkegaard described a specific type of despair called ‘despair of necessity’, where the person is so absorbed in the trivialities of daily life—their job, social standing, and “habits” - that they lose the ability to imagine themselves as anything other than a "cog in the machine”. To this person, everything feels "fatalistic" or fated, and they lose the mental freedom to imagine that life is a possibility.

GOD & POSSIBILITY

God is an universal concept or a belief for whom everything is possible. It is about our spirit, not the body. X is making you lose your spirit. It reduces your Faith in God (possibility) and prayers. It reduces your hopes, your spirit (self) as you believe nothing can change. The masses essentially trade their spiritual freedom for the "safety" of necessity.

Kierkegaard famously states that to be in the despair of necessity is to effectively deny God, because it denies that any divine or "impossible" change can occur. He notes that for the person in this despair, prayer makes no sense, because prayer requires the belief that the "necessary" course of events can be altered by a higher power.

Isn’t it strange that X being labelled as ‘Saviour of Hinduism’ actually is reducing faith in God? Don’t you hear us saying, “I don’t believe in God but I like the Hindu rituals”, “Hinduism is not a religion, it is a way of life”, “I am an Atheist”, etc.

Only with the mobile, among the soul-less, X can convince en masse that killing Mahatma Gandhi was a good thing. It is impossible to do that with a book.

Only if we put the mobile aside will our society regain the time to think again, to be spiritual, to think of possibilities and to neutralise X.

Who is X? In short, X is the rich capitalist forces who are guided by capital and debt. From thousands of years, they have been using different formulas to exploit the poor and the latest being despair.

Imagine why the handing over of the airports, defence, huge tracts of land to capitalists, high fuel price, low INR value, lesser MGNREGA jobs, Manipur, CAA protests, Rafael Deal, Losing of Rafael in Ops Sindoor, 18% tariff by the US, repeated insults by Trump, Pakistan becoming the mediator between US and Iran, Rape charges, Zubeen’s death in case of Assam - nothing effects the voter preference for X.

X will keep winning till the reels keep running.

Assam had an effective dissenter called Akhil Gogoi. He arranged massive protests on the roads during the Tarun Gogoi Government. I don’t know whether Akhil Gogoi understands this or not, but the kind of public mobilisation he could do then, it is impossible in today’s mobile era when X is creating the ‘reels’. He himself is reduced to ‘using’ his mother for reels.

In the end, remember, this is a hidden disease.

It is a sickness that doesn’t know it is sick. The spirit is indestructible and the soul will rise, people will suffer psychologically. If we observe carefully, the supporters of capitalist X are an unhappy, irritated, angry set of people already. You won’t find a single one of them who has the mindset of reading a whole book. The once avid readers had shifted to audio books and then to no books.

If we observe carefully, number of temples and temple tourism have increased but temples have lost the spirit. They have become places of ‘transactions’ where the vulnerable, the sad are going to buy salvation. Priests have become greedy and have started valuing money (capital) more that the spirit. Fear of God is at its peak and it is where Godlessness starts. God has become finite when it is all about infinity (possibilities).

We must understand that psychology is being weaponised. We must lay importance on the individual, over the collective. At a time when philosophers like Hegel were building massive systems using universal history / culture, Kierkegaard attacked his ideal and shifted the focus back to the "single individual" and their subjective experience. He wrote how individual despair is a necessary, though painful, tool for realizing one’s true self. True self-discovery involves overcoming the illusion of external things, systems, rituals, culture and traditions.

Ask a psychologist whether what I wrote is true or not. Ask someone who has studied existentialism. Read Søren Kierkegaard.

Ask AI whether what I wrote is true or false. Ask “Can the content of social media on our mobiles that induces scrolling for instant doses of good feeling cause despair of necessity by not allowing one to face the despair? Can it reduce faith in God? ”

To the capitalist forces and the rulers, I make an appeal - stop using mobile phones to keep people away from despair. If you do not stop, the country will suffer greatly, and in that destruction, you yourselves will be wiped out.

To everyone who read this post completely, you are the hope. You must spread and promote the habit of reading books and listening to the nature. Become individual examples of good living, love and care for the needy.