The Inner Ruler we Coronate in the Age of the Coronavirus

There is a popular tale of an old man who once told his grandson the story of a battle that occurs inside of each person. “My son,” he said, “each of us has two wolves inside us who fight each other all the time. One wolf is about kindness, understanding, peace, compassion, generosity, and all things good in this world. The other is about jealousy, greed, hatred, malice and selfishness.”

The young man asked, “Which wolf wins?” The old man replied simply, “The one you feed.”

While there is dispute around whether the above tale is a Native American legend, the story makes a larger point in these days when the coronavirus has upended our ways of living and being. The point is this: We contain multiple identities within each of us, and the identity that dominates is the one we nurture with our everyday attitudes and our actions.

There is a thriving field of research in academia, called social identity theory, that studies how particular identities become prominent in our self-concept at different times and situations. The findings suggest that an identity becomes prominent, or “salient” in the language of academics, if it can be recalled easily and if it fits the current context.     

This theme of multiple identities contained within us is an especially popular motif in ancient Indian philosophy. It first appeared in the Rig Veda as an image of two birds in a tree and was then picked up in the Upanishads as a metaphor for two identities in each body. 

As the Mundaka Upanishad (III.1.1) says,

There are two birds, two dear friends,
That live in the very same tree.
The one eats the fruit in anxious greed,
While the other watches silently.

While the first bird is our anxious, self-interested ego-identity, the other bird is the universal identity that is our compassionate and untroubled inner witness.

Its helpful to examine ourselves in this Covid-19 crisis to understand which identity we allow to dominate through the everyday feedstock of our attitudes. Here are some examples:

1. Individualist vs. Collectivist: These identities are fed by the following attitudes: “I can do what I want with my life” vs. “We’re in this together and my actions affect others.” 

   Examples of the former are people who decide to continue with life-as-usual even after being tested positive for the virus. It is as if they care little for the impact of their infection on other people. Examples of the latter are people who see themselves as a part of the whole and voluntarily self-quarantine themselves as needed.  Threats like the coronavirus demand not an individual fight-or-flight but a collective tend-and-befriend response. Despite the short-term measure of social distancing, what the crisis really points to is the need for a public infrastructure that takes care of the weakest of us.  

2. Skeptic vs. Proactivist: The attitudes that feed these identities are: “This is all scaremongering by the media and government” vs. “Better to be ahead than dead. 

   While the media and government often thrive on creating fear, they are also sometimes right. But when it comes to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), overreacting is the preferred choice when compared to the alternative. The question to ask is: Which is more likely to be crippling – the societal costs of overreaction if the fears turn out to be overblown, or the societal costs of death and suffering if they turn out to be justified?  A similar logic holds for climate change and other existential threats that have crossed a threshold of likelihood already.   

3. Folklorist vs. Scientist: Examples of these identities are the following associated attitudes: “Spreading folklore opinions and assurances is helpful” vs. “Let’s do what evidence and the scientific truth tell us to do. 

   People who spread untested diagnoses or cures that they heard from their grandmother or a local quack forget that this virus is new to humanity. Sometimes these untested diagnoses masquerade as astrological predictions. But what is not new is the science behind how to contain this contagion and slow down the spread of the pandemic. The lessons from the 1918 flu pandemic are clear for both governments and people – follow and communicate the truth based on the evidence and not on unfounded hope. 

4. Ethnocentrist vs. Globalist: Examples of associated attitudes can be categorized as: “Our Indian culture is better than other cultures” vs. “Viruses are agnostic to cultures.”

   There are several examples of these attitudes, including beliefs in the merits of cow dung, cow urine and other cow products, and the efficacy of our religious mantras in dealing with the coronavirus. But viruses do not respect sacred cows nor sacred mantras, as their thriving presence across all religions and cultures in India attests. In a metaphorical sense, they are multicultural because their gods are bound by biochemistry and not national borders, while our gods are bound by our cultures.

5. Revenge Biocentrist vs. Pragmatism: These identities thrive on attitudes such as “The human race deserves what is happening to it” vs. “This is an opportunity to learn the right lessons for my own way of living.”

   There is a sneaky comfort in feeling that the virus is a response by nature to the destruction inflicted on it by the human race. But biocentrism, which reasonably views homo sapiens as not superior to other species in a moral or ethical sense, does not have to veer toward fantasies of nature’s revenge. At times like this, the specific joys of forging a new lifestyle that is based on learning from this opportunity rather than the abstract satisfaction from punishing an entire species is far more tangible and useful in moving forward.        

6. Separatist vs. Connectionist: Finally, there are the respective attitudes encapsulated in “This is an opportunity to catch up with movies on the Internet” vs. “This is an opportunity to reconnect to my immediate family and myself.”

   Given the hectic pace of modern work, the thought of binge-watching on Netflix or Amazon is enticing.  But if are to follow the Rahmian (or rather Romerian) dictum of never letting a crisis go to waste, then the far graver crisis that the coronavirus points to is that of a loss of deep connection to people and to our own self. Our attention economy has eaten away at that most precious resource – attentive time spent with people we care about, in meaningful activities, and in quiet contemplation. This crisis enables us to reconnect as we once knew but have forgotten, or to connect virtually in ways that are meaningful. 

An underlying theme in all these identities is that we have a choice between two ways of being, one that ancient wisdom has long considered. The first, described as a way of being for the isolated self, is all about doing and having only for oneself. It is tilted more to the “lower bird” way of being in this world, to the greedy wolf that is focused on narrow self-interest and shadowed by fear, doubt, superiority, and separation. 

But even as the coronavirus leaves an ever-growing trail of real suffering and destruction, it also presents a real opportunity for re-discovering a different way of life during and after this crisis. It is a more beingful way of life and work, described as the way of the connected self.  It is tilted more to the “higher bird” way of being in the world, to the generous wolf that knows we need to be connected to our pack for the uncertain path ahead, despite our need to maintain some social distance.

Which bird or beast we prefer to coronate and feed through our attitudes and actions during this crisis will determine if we have learned well from it.