Blindfolded nation


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Recently a friend of mine pointed me to one interesting Pakistani video. To be honest, I don’t get a word what the video is about, since it is on Pakistani language, but you can kinda get the message from the fact that all the adults in the video are blindfolded. The video is called “A blindfolded nation”, and you can see it here: 

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152794667455239

This clean message video is posting is quite universal. As people grow up, they are becoming blindfolded for various things they should not be. But it would be interesting to analyze why it is happening? Why majority of people are becoming blindfolded in all the nations all over the world?

The reasons are I believe many. Few of them are lack of empathy, education, background and certainly media.

 

Lack of empathy

Empathy drives the community forward. If people look after each other and help each other in times of need, the world would be a better place. It is sometimes hard and because of this people often chose to close their eyes and become blindfolded. Its not their business what is happening to someone else. But actually it is! Because same thing can happen to them some time. War, robbery, sexual and physical abuse can happen anywhere. If we close eyes when it happens to others, others will when it will be happening to us. And in many things, especially like war, things are not black and white and one should not chose side, but rather help people overcome the conflict. There are many examples when the part of international community took some side in war preventing genocide on one side, but enabling it on the other (i.e. Kosovo, Croatia, Iraq, Avganistan, Siria, Libia, etc.). In some cases it is much more clear, but still might not be black and white. For example abuse is much more clear, and one can take side, but there might be some background which greys the story.

Education and knowledge

People often learn to close their eyes before things. And as many argued that schools kills creativity it also kills empathy sometimes. There are some achievements one should achieve no matter what. And it is rough surrounding with  a lot of bulling and abuse. Kids often force each other to close eyes and not report the things they should. And this way people also learn that they should not care about bad things happenings around them and that sometimes reporting could have bad consequences (i.e. consequent bullying).

Life background

Life background influences a lot. Background is also about learning. In some communities people are more compassionate to each other. In big cities it is often not the case. Someone may have seen some atrocities and can detect if something wrong is going to happen, while other have never been in similar situation and they don’t know and don’t care what is going to happen until it happens, when it is too late.

Influence of media

Media influences a lot. Media can serve stories that will make us act or not act. It often depends on editors, but also on government what they want people to do, what to believe, what values to honour. It is often wrong values, but it keeps governments safe and sound.

Born in Bratislava, Slovakia, lived in Belgrade, Serbia, now living in Manchester, UK, and visitng the world. Nikola is a great enthusiast of AI, natural language processing, machine learning, web application security, open source, mobile and web technologies. Looking forward to create future. Nikola has done PhD in natural language processing and machine learning at the University of Manchester where he worked for 2 years. In 2020, Nikola moved to Berlin and works in Bayer Pharma R&D as a computational scientist.

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