Rohit Nalluri

I very strongly feel that the more you allow your mind to give in to the daily rigors of routine, to the trash-bag-of-mango-pulp shape of popular opinion, to the easy path of average ideas, the more you surrender your mind to their ravages. You may have been awake once, alive once, you may even now, in rare moments, reach out with your mind to such elevations that you break through the grim clouds and catch a glimpse of the sun – and in these moments you know and FEEL that you are indeed alive – but the more you allow the mind to succumb to ideas and thoughts and words that don’t gel with you, that don’t feel like they belong with you, that just don’t feel right to you, the further you disappear into the background. You will become one of them – those people you see who live their lives carrying the entire weight of it on their shoulders; living as if they have been forced to live, as if they have no other choice but to live. These are the living dead, zombies amidst us, ghosts walking in broad daylight. They have been silenced, their voice boxes punctured by the knife of someone else’s opinion. A long time ago, they had the courage to speak out, before they thought that ‘courage’ was a thing one needed to have speak their own minds. Now, they know better. They don’t need courage. They agree with you. They agree with you, and him, and her, and everyone else in the world who is like them. They are in agreement with the agenda of averages. And if you succumb to the ‘ease’ of their ideas, then you will become like them – a watered down version of yourself, a filtered version, an averaged version.

Years ago, when they had a voice, they were pummeled into submission by a host of other voices – their average parents, their average friends, their average teachers, their average leaders, their average government. Pummeled and beaten and silenced and knifed through the voice box and through that part of the soul that was identical, and by identical I mean unique, and by unique I mean rare. They rebelled until they had energy in their ideas. When rebellion failed, they removed themselves from conversation, and assumed a distraught silence, living with their ideas in self-imposed exile. This failed too – because while you may be silent, the averages around you are anything but. Their strength is in numbers and their voice is blaring, confident and self-satisfyingly biased. People flock to the average like the sheep they are. Having failed in their silent rebellion, many begin to comply. At first, it is a simple nod of agreement to an average thought spoken by an average. This is where the surrender of the mind begins. They have lost the resolve to continue fighting. So they give in. So YOU give in. You start speaking like them, to be part of the fold, to be part of the flock. Then you start acting like them. And then you start THINKING like them – and this is where you lose your mind. Once you lose your mind, you are not alive anymore. You are living, but dead, another ant in a line of ants. You don’t know WHY you are doing the things you are doing, you just do it because everyone else is. Go ask them why they are doing it in the first place, and the most common answer you will get it is ‘because it has always been done this way’. Soon you are left not with a flock of sheep but a flock of fools, none of whom know why they do the things they do. This is happening everywhere, and has happened everywhere since the beginning of humanity. The people around you impress upon you what they think is the best for you, and for them. They will tell you, this and this is best for you, but secretly they know that this is best for them as well. It is good for the status quo if everyone maintains the status quo. The Agenda of Averages is a pyramid scheme devised for mind-control, and will only succeed if you stop questioning. So they will tell you not to do what you want to do, and instead ask you, beg you, threaten you, force you, even kill you to do what THEY THINK IS RIGHT for you.

The irony is that they don’t know either – the averages. The average don’t know that their own voices have been silenced, that they live now within the agenda of averages, because some other average impressed upon them the advantage of average. And so the ideas that reach you are so rigid, so inflexible, so old and so watered down: they are the average of already median ideas that evolved from mediocre ideas. When someone tells you they know best, run in the opposite direction, find a silent spot, sit down and think for yourself.

How to Defeat the Agenda of Averages:

1. Think for yourself. 

    Especially for things that are not dependent on facts or obvious truth, think for yourself. The more you think for yourself, the more you are secured from the agenda of averages. Do not listen to ideologies and ancient dogmas. They don’t work any more in the world we live in. In fact, it would not be a bad idea for humanity to start over again every 100 years – by vacating all religions, by deleting all dogmas, by cleaning all ideologies. Radical idea? I thought of it myself.

2. Deal in Facts & Truth. 

     Many ideologies and dogmas are based on superstition and false facts and false statements polished to look true. The individual mind must be an investigative mind. It must be inquisitive and curious, and forever embark on the pursuit of truth. This quest for truth in and of all things must be a pact you make with yourself, a lifelong promise to uphold and search always for truth.

3. Be scared, very scared, of losing yourself.

     Are you scared of drowning? The moment you agree with an average idea, you will be drowned in a sea of average voices. The more you agree, the more you forget your own individuality, and lose the only real thing that really mattered in this world – yourself. It becomes so bad that after some point the mind doesn’t rebel, it just becomes an average mind in an average world living an unremarkable, average life waiting for a middling, average death.

4. Be Angry.

    Be angry at that possibility – the possibility that you will be forced to surrender your mind, the last and only bastion of your identity, and be turned it into a slave of the agenda; be forced to live a life stipulated by a collection of idiots that never had an original thought in their lives, that suppress originality, individuality, clarity.

Be angrier at the thought that you will find a way to be happy within your slavery.

5. The Agenda is dumb, so Be Kind. 

     The sheep don’t know they are doing this to themselves. They have spent a lifetime listening to average ideas. A radical idea will shock them. So be kind, be gentle, but be firm. Tell them perhaps, that following your own mind is not a reflection on them or their upbringing or their friendship or their teaching, but a necessity for you.

*