“Thinking has not solved our problems. The clever ones, the philosophers, the scholars, the political leaders, have not solved any of our human problems—which are the relationship between you and another, between you and myself.” — J. Krishnamurti
Kunal Kamra’s tweet about OLA Electric’s poor customer service caused the company’s market valuation to tank. Almost ₹4,000 crores gone overnight! Vanished.
Will the company regain its valuation? Who is wrong and who is right? These are not questions we will examine. But one thing worth noticing is the amount of attention the public spat between Kamra and OLA’s founder Bhavesh Agarwal got.
Kamra was creating awareness about OLA Electric’s customer service, and it seems that awareness is all we care about. People post Instagram stories about the horrors of war to create awareness. But the next update is about how they are enjoying shopping.
Or they tag the brand that a brand didn’t meet to their expectations to create awareness about how “pathetic” it is. (Posting on social media is necessary when an entity doesn’t own up to its mistake. But to do this when your food was 10 minutes late because of traffic…?)
We also tend to repost and forward such posts when they appear on our timelines. We tag brands, politicians, and sportspeople and demand that they take action. Our job to make the world a better place is done by creating awareness, right?
Awareness Can Cause More Damage
Actually, no. If anything, we’ve made matters worse.
In most cases, raising awareness creates the opposite effect of what we want. For instance, when the visitors to Arizona’s Petrified Forest were made aware of the high frequency of other visitors’ stealing petrified wood, they were more likely to the same. The information “normalized undesirable conduct,” researchers explained. “If everyone is doing it, why can’t I do it too?”
A committee on preventing gender-based violence observed a similar reaction. They wrote that awareness about GBV made people think that it’s a common practice in the community and often took it as a a license to do the same. This led to an increase in GBV rather than reducing it.
We can assume the same happens with brands. When their competitors also get tagged, they probably slack off — “Hey! It’s not just us. Everyone is screwing up.” Likewise, sharing posts on communal hatred fuels it instead of quelling it.
How to Make the World A Better Place?
Simple. Let’s create role models of the people who get their hands dirty, not the ones who “raise awareness” or who write from ivory towers about how to solve problems.
Ivory-tower experts might give rousing speeches, have impeccable vocabulary and enviable college degrees, and drop a lot of information (which we misinterpret as wisdom). To an extent, awareness is essential. But such experts often take it to the extreme and create noise.
Meanwhile, all of humankind’s progress — our comfort, the people pulled out of poverty, disasters averted, habitats restored — have occurred because of people who worked. People who led by action and “vivified the will of people” to join their noble causes to make the world a better place.
Let us find such people and promote the good work they’re doing. And let’s take a leaf out of their book and work on problems we notice instead of debating over who is to blame for them.
The kind of people you focus on is the person you become.