Last Sunday morning I was looking through the Sunday newspapers with a hot cup of freshly brewed coffee when the doorbell rang. I was not expecting anyone. I put the paper on the table and reluctantly got up. Doorbell rang again.
At the door there was a young man, 30ish, tall, heavily built in worn out jeans and a shabby hooded black fleece jumper. Due to the hood upper half of his face was in dark. Beside him was a bike which he held with both his hands.
“YES” I said rather loudly. He must have noticed the annoyance and a bit of hostility in my voice. I certainly noticed it.
“Sorry to bother you mate; your keys are hanging there.” He pointed at the door where my key ring was hanging. I must have left the key in the lock last night when we came after dinner at a friend’s house. Beside the main-door key the ring also had the keys of patio and the car.
I felt so ashamed at my impoliteness that I could not speak. "Are you OK, mate?” the stranger said anxiously. I got my composure back and thanked him profusely.
“It’s nothing. You would have done the same” He said smiling and turned back to the road.
After he was gone, I was very uneasy and ashamed. Why did I behave so rudely? It’s not my usual state of being.
Reflecting on the encounter I think that some of the following factors might have contributed
- I was too engrossed in the newspaper, halfway through an interesting article. The door bell ring felt like an intrusion. So even before I opened the door I was annoyed.
- When I saw this young man with a hood covering part of his face, in untidy clothes I felt no qualms in stereotyping him. A young man hiding his face he must be a hoodlum and was up to no good.
- The flashy mountain bike beside him did not help the situation. My already preconditioned brain perceived it as an efficient snatch and grab getaway vehicle!
It all happened in a flash, no conscious thinking on my part.
Recently there have been incidences in London where criminals have snatched mobiles from pedestrians. The perpetrators were usually hooded young men on bicycles or mopeds. Short CCTV clips have been shown on the national Television and are doing rounds on Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media platforms. I have not paid much attention to these but they must have stayed in some corners of my brain.
The brain regularly tunes itself so that it can take fast evasive and neutralising actions to recurrent threats by preconditioning us without our conscious awareness. This clearly has an evolutionary survival benefit. Our long passed ancestors only knew about such incidences when they or their local community experienced these encounters. Now we are constantly bombarded with audiovisual clips (some true, some fake) from all over the world 24/7. We usually do not pay much conscious attention and rightly so. But the unconscious part our brain does; its rationale is brute survival.
Recent decline of general civility and increase in communal hatred worldwide is a serious by-product of this information explosion. Ironically the very brain trait that ensured human survival and development of civilizations may now become a mortal threat to the civil society which we so enjoy living in.
