What do we know really about survival? Let’s start briefly with the human journey as a species. It is strictly clear that we are here because our primitive ancestors survived. Historians, anthropologists, and biologists had been a really long debate on this until they reached a point that Homo Sapiens finally ‘won’ over Homo Neanderthals because it had special ability to survive. If you read Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), you will understand the process and how human’s communication ability evolved in that period of time. That ability is what made Sapiens able to socialize, which is later became the real factor of human nature. Nonetheless, if I may take out Harari’s idea, he suggests that we, human, survive because of fiction. ‘.. [Fiction] has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively.’

‘Fiction’ in the past was slightly different from our current age. Surely it was still in the form of stories; you can mention all of it: myths, legends, folk tales, saga. But ‘the stories’ back then was veritably weighty that it was able to motivate people even strangers to cooperate or kill each other. Undeniably, the legacy of those stories still lingers for the time being and we can really experience it in daily life. What makes it still powerful does not merely lay on the story itself, but the successful efforts to convince people on believing it. The major evolvement (and I would say such an achievement) of the stories: it became institutionalized and highly systematized in the form of, for example, religions and faith systems and/or states.

This is the main paradox of human survival: the reality of it is based on imagination — the not-really real reality.

I remember when I read a story about the 30 September movement in primary school. As a kid, my first reaction was of course, “Why these communist people were so bad? What these good generals did? The generals fought for the country, and they did not. They just wanted power and position.” Really, I still remember this vividly because, for the next six years, the story was repeated. Until one day, in my first year of senior high school, my history teacher said in the introductory class, “Sorry guys, we will not discuss the September movement.” Bluntly then I asked why. “Because the story is not 100 per cent true, there’s a lot of misinformation and incomplete stories in the text book. So let’s just skip it.”

That was my first enlightenment that not everything you read is true and not every knowledge you heard in the class is the most right. All of these are the product of imagination, supported by numbers, model, and secondary stories. When history should be about real fact, unfortunately, it’s not always. Most times, ‘history’ is also a fiction, imaginary stories to serve a political and power-posses purpose. From then I always question every single thing, trying to find what’s the alternative story from one particular narrative. It is so much different when you accept ‘imagination’ with your own consent, compare with being ‘forced’ to believe it, right?

But then again this is also contested. For example, some people are aware enough that the story of 30 September is not completely true, but then they volunteer themselves to still ‘believe’ in it anyway. This is where the hurdle resides: there is no direct causality between knowing the truth and believe in it. But for several people who want to believe the opposite image of what they really know, it’s also for survival, either in a naïve view (to be accepted in particular social community) or for a political economic reason (to gain power, mass mobilization, acknowledged by the authority). Surely some other people can point the wrongness of that kind of image through proper arguments. In fact, it is encouraged to open more discussion and debate without any fright of accusation for being wrong. Yet there is no way for someone (or some people) to shut down the others to imagine, express, or spread it. Not even the authority; they even should ensure that kind of freedom.

Wait, what about the emerging of anti-scientific-fact imagination?

‘Earth is flat’ phenomenon, if I may call it, was born from another imagination; either it is based on religious conservatism, another political economic reason (e.g. fossil fuel industries denied environmental problem), or simply in form of bigotry. We should avoid the spread of this anti-intellectual movement, right?

Well, maybe. Let me try to briefly explain on this.

Feyerabend with his Against Methods is one of the champions of cultural relativism. He is well known as the betrayer of truth — alongside with Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn — and become science’s worst enemy due to his rejection towards the scientific methodology that often undermines other forms of knowledge. In fact, he kind of defends astrology and creationism. But what somehow mistaken from Feyerabend is that people merely see his thought epistemologically. His slight comment on an interview with Horgan (2016)was, “What does it mean, ‘intellectual’? It means people who think about things longer than other people, perhaps. But many of them just ran over other people saying, ‘We have figured it out.’” Feyerabend talks about power relations between sources of knowledge; an undeniably high superiority on a certain way of finding the truth somehow could fall into tyranny.

‘Imagination’ is necessary because our reality is too complex to be understood. We try to understand it by crunching numbers, compiling happening affairs, making the database of realities, still, all of them are nothing without contested meaning, values, and judgment towards them. The problem what we have right now is limited understanding about the reasons behind imagination that leads to namely anti-intellectual. What actually drive people to reject science? What kind of imagination that usually used? Why people choose that certain imagination? How does the process of cognitive and selectivity? Quoting Feyerabend again, “To say these people are ignorant is just … ignorance.”

In the end, how does it really related to our survival? If we survive through fiction, then the conundrum lays on the diversification of fiction and imagination. “But facts through the scientific method is not imagination, it has proofs!” Indeed, I also know that if I light myself on fire, I will be burned. Yet again my concern is how we bring science collectively if there are numbers of beliefs and imaginations out there considered as well as truth. Not to mention those imaginations make people survive and able to preserve their actuality as human. Surely we are also at a critical point where we take our survivability for granted and diminish ‘others’ existence in very cruel ways. This Janus face of our survivability is, subsequently, our reality. It is then become our will to choose what kind of imagination we want to bring in order to retain our being, to preserve our ability to be human, to be not just live but also belong, isn’t it?