A New Faith: Part 1: Chapter 11

Sara’s actions had other consequences too, those that had not yet crossed her mind. She was starting to realize what could happen to her. Because of the complex web of human relations spanning both space and time, she had inadvertently unleashed mayhem that not only upended the peace in Sequoia, but went far and wide into the world. Of course, she had never intended to affect Sequoia, let alone the rest of the world. As best as she could make sense of her out-of-character actions was that she had, momentarily, lost all control of herself when she had killed Nadeem. She was not regretting his death. But she was certainly aghast that she had caused it. That was not her. It would not happen again, she vowed to herself.

Shahid’s instinctive reaction when Alia and Santosh had questioned him was the second domino to fall in the ensuing mayhem. The thing with the “falling dominoes” metaphor is that the dominoes have to be placed together in the correct order and sufficiently close to each other for the first one to eventually cause the last one to fall. Put too large a domino next to the first one or put the second domino too far apart from the first one, and nothing much happens except the fall of the first domino. 

The ubiquity of the internet, social media platforms, and a more or less permanently connected device in the hands of every human being on the planet had ensured the creation of an extremely sensitive and incredibly efficient system of dominoes. At the command of the owners of these social media platforms, the speed with which the dominoes fell could be controlled quite precisely. Or at least the owners thought so. In reality, the control was uni-directional: how to increase the speed of propagation. There really was no dial to slow things down. But they didn’t really care much about slowing anything down. After all they liked to assert, "move fast and break things." No one among them ever said, "move slow and build things."

The human domino takes a lot more effort to topple for the simple reason that most humans don’t really want to expend energy, whether physical or emotional. Very few, voluntarily, choose to climb hills, especially, steep ones. Most just prefer to lope downhill. That is, if they need to move in the first place! Similarly, very few people even make the effort to change someone else’s mind let alone kill them because they disagree with them. After all, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to kill someone. And an even larger effort when the intended victim is fighting back. So, most humans simply prefer to find ways to get along with others as it takes the least effort on their part. 

That is why, it takes extraordinary effort from someone to get not just one but many humans to hurt others. It is extraordinary because one has to know exactly which buttons to push and how firmly. In addition, appropriate tools are necessary to push those buttons. The social media platforms that proliferated since the turn of the century were those tools. Very effective tools, especially, in the hands of the people with the most depraved intentions of all. Authoritarians that unleash wars were an example of those kind of people. 

Of course, those button-pushing skills and the tools could also be deployed by good people to get others to do good things. Those who do these good things end up becoming the saints that people look up to. One key difference between the bad-intentioned actors and the good-intentioned ones is that the former don’t want their followers to think for themselves, while the latter want the exact opposite. Being good is innate and that is what the saints have been relying on. But being bad requires one to shut down one’s conscience completely. 

Shahid was not wired, naturally, to go and kill someone. Just as Sara hadn’t been. But the social media platforms through which they had maintained their connections with the world beyond Sequoia, had put them in such a position where their vulnerabilities could be harnessed for nefarious purposes. It is not as if they went and sought out the knowledge that exacerbated their pre-existing grievances. But neither did they realize that the platforms that they thought existed to help them get along with others, were being systematically used to trigger their worst instincts. So when Nadeem inadvertently crossed Sara’s path, her worst instincts took charge of her actions without her realizing it until it was too late. The same thing was about to happen with Shahid.

The two triggers that are most effective in provoking a violent reaction in a person are the perception of being disrespected and treated unfairly. To be sure, these triggers don’t have to actually exist. It is sufficient that the person only perceives the existence of those triggers to react to them. And react with extreme prejudice! 

Sara’s enduring sense of being treated unjustly all her life was the trigger that had led her to destroying Nadeem. In reality, Nadeem had not even seen her let alone touch her or harm her directly. In her mind, though, she saw no difference between him and his two gang-members who were the ones who had actually tortured and killed her family. To her, delivering justice to Nadeem was the same as punishing the real killers. 

In Shahid’s case, the trigger was perceived disrespect. As a Muslim growing up in Hindu-dominant India, his entire life had consisted of being treated as a second-class citizen at best. Most of the times, he was just invisible to the Hindus in power. He was a nobody. Except when the powerful Hindus were looking for some Muslim to make an example out of. The police had, typically, served as the designated henchmen for delivering the pain. In his eyes, Alia and Santosh were part of that same police force who had routinely abused him back in India. The way that Alia had questioned him, had left a perception of being absolutely humiliated in his mind. In reality, both Alia and Santosh had been professional and respectful. Ironically, both Alia and Santosh had themselves faced discrimination in their pre-Sequoia lives - Alia for being a Muslim woman in Iran and Santosh for being part of a forest-dwelling tribe in India.  

Nonetheless, that interaction was sufficient enough reason to tip Shahid into a vicious spiral of self-victimization that was further fed by the hatred flooding his social media feed. Yes, the term “feed” was indeed apt even if it may have been inadvertent. Shahid was being forcefully fed hatred. Which he voraciously and unwittingly consumed. Thus, a decent cafe barista and an art gallery owner in Sequoia became easily radicalized. The healing power of Sequoia had been overcome by the poison of hatred from far away lands. Shahid stewed in an ever-deepening pool of fetid emotions that inexorably led him to violence of the most horrific kind.

Tozi, who had already begun monitoring the social media platforms for collecting data on Nadeem (and Qasim), started seeing alarming signs of provocative forms of communications among the people of Sequoia. Other people living in far away places had also begun interacting with Sequoians around these deadly issues. Within a very short period of time, the sense of Muslim victimhood had exploded. And in almost no time, following that particular emotion, the notion of “jihad” (or holy war) started spiking in various places. Most disturbingly, thought Tozi with dismay, one of the spikes had shown up in Sequoia. She frantically scrolled through the histories of the most talkative voices on the various platforms and was stunned to see that this spike had come from nowhere. None of the voices had shown any sign of anger or violence whatsoever for the past five years. Then suddenly, as if someone had thrown a switch in their heads, the anger had been activated. It was the vicious kind which usually culminated in violence. Virtual at first, but she was sure that it would become real soon if something was not done to stop it in its tracks. She pulled together a short presentation with this data and sent it to Alia who then passed it on to Sonia. 

Shahid was shaking with an odd mixture of fear and anger. He had just finished watching the videos of the Washington DC and New Delhi massacres that had taken over his social media feed. The fear was primal. He had been afraid all his life. Of violent death that could come for him at any moment. He had seen it take away many people since his childhood in India’s Uttar Pradesh, one of its poorest and most violent states. He had seen his father’s death. A memory that had started fading, especially, in the last five years, but which now had suddenly become vivid. 

The anger was the unusual reaction in his case. At some point in his life, he didn’t remember when, people had started treating him like a do-er and not a child or a victim. His family had actually started asking him for his advice. Even when he moved to Sequoia, his family had continued that practice. The fact that he was running a small business, a successful one at that, in Sequoia brought him even more respect from people beyond his immediate family. When he first got angry with someone back home, he was not sure who it was, probably his mother, he had seen the fear pop up in her eyes. He had felt ashamed immediately and tried to calm her down after that incident. But it had also felt… good. It was an entirely new feeling for him - to be able to express anger at someone and then to be feared because of that. He was confused because he didn’t really have much to feel angry about anyway. So that sense of power he had felt in that moment had fizzled out over time. Every now and then, he would become faux angry just to see the fear in the eyes of whoever he was talking with. It was like a guilty pleasure of sorts. 

The anger that was coursing through him right now, though, was nothing like that. He had lashed out online and it had not satiated him at all. This was the kind of anger that seemed to seek something to consume. It was consuming him, no doubt. But that was not sufficient. Watching little children being mowed down by automatic rifles in the Washington DC mosque had driven him so mad with grief that he had cried all night, eventually falling asleep out of sheer exhaustion. Then on top of that came the bloody videos of families from Delhi. The violent mob had used swords to hack away at the cowering families. Then the mob had gone out of its way to gloat about it and film it for posterity. The revulsion that he had felt couldn’t be expressed in words. Initially, he had been viscerally scared of getting killed by the Christians and Hindus in Sequoia. But that feeling had slowly passed as the anger started exerting its power on his heart. He had to do something. He decided that ranting online was not sufficient, he must act. He would not be a victim anymore. He was now someone that others feared. He was going to war. And in his mind, the first face that swam into focus was that of Santosh wearing that traditional Hindu red mark on his forehead. He decided that he was not going to merely hurt Santosh, but he was going to do something that would strike fear in the very hearts of the others. Make THEM quail in front of his fury. The time for mere words was over. It was now time to act!

Unfortunately, there were no countervailing ideas that Shahid could draw on that would have steered him away from the violent course of action that he had embarked upon. No voice of sanity, no voice of reason, no principles, no morals, no religion… just an utter absence of beliefs that could have pushed back on his violent impulses, firmly and unrelentingly. Sequoia had come into existence in a hurry. It was a physical place. It had a purpose in the sense that survival can be a purpose. And survival is not exactly a conscious purpose for most living beings, especially, humans who have long been inventing new ways to survive. 

Sequoia took care of mere survival, in any case. There was shelter, food, water, and other basic necessities for living. The purpose of Sequoia was to somehow generate sufficient income to be allowed to exist in its current form. While that was a common goal for all Sequoians, it didn’t easily translate into how someone should feel about something or what to do and not do. So people like Shahid and Sara simply fell back on the ways of thinking that they had grown up with - relying on family values or religious principles or societal norms that they were most familiar with. The passage of time had just not been long enough for a unique Sequoian way of life to fully emerge and get universally embraced. No one had even attempted to articulate what this new way of life could be. Then how would Sara and Shahid know how to think about the issues that been thrown at their faces by life?