The Bamboozled Masses
We are living in an era where people have been subject to a swirl fo information with little curation and even less confirmation. They are driven by the basest of instincts, the things that glimmer and titillate, which in turn amp up the algorithms to deliver more emotional triggers, leaving us wide eyed and horrified, just like the leader of the droogs in the Kubrick movie A Clockwork Orange.
Yet, we are not being re-programmed to be less sadistic; we are not being programmed at all. It is a free for all where spark and frivolity rule, where our brains settle into a blur of complacent idiocy, abandoning all cognitive stress. Doom scrolling is just that; it is feeding our sense of doom that nothing matters except the next swipe. We know that lying in this abyss makes as a nauseating and useless mass. We just don’t have the wherewithal to do much more.
Our own mass streams of stupid human tricks have become the self-created opiate of the masses, so much more crass than anything dreamt up by turn of the last century economic philosophers or by the Silicon Valley bros. We want to giggle or guffaw but not because we have learnt but because we have been prodded. Giggle as if this were a sign of happiness and as if happiness was a goal at all. Poked, like a needle in the arm, we want the drip, drip, drip and not much more. We worry about artificial intelligence and yet large swathes of our conscious and subconscious minds are already being run by machines. We like it.
This is making many of us exceptionally stupid and angry. We are prone to bite into the conspiratorial, the flagrant, and the exploitive. Our senses are most aroused when pitted against an other, be it an other idea or an other person. Everyone is a critic and everyone is wrong. It is not anti-expertise—it is anti-everything. This is well beyond Edward Said’s criticisms and instead a maelstrom where any and all information is a disorganised and chaotic swirl that leaves a path like a tornado in our brains. That line of destruction is what it takes to make one feel alive.
Minds are more easily broken than I ever imagined. I needed to figure out how to manoeuvre in a world without a lot of guidance. I needed to establish strategies and systems for dealing with emotional tumult. My mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer when I was twelve. She went through a string of lovers in my teens. We had no money or future, really. I developed my own world beyond her, and moved abroad at 18, finding my way to the Middle East and then back to the US again where I tripped my way through academia and various professions.
To be sane, or relatively so, meant being able to interpret the world on my terms. I became and remain stubbornly and unhelpfully independent, prone to rely only upon myself. This led to an existence beyond institutions —no big jobs or titles for me—and instead as one shares my uniquely carved perspectives, trifles, with like minded audiences. It is a living. It has also made me wholly unsympathetic to just how massively people can be bamboozled.
People are not questioning or challenging the infuriation they receive. They are not trying to link with what they know and their own moral compass. They just want to be right, in 20-second snippets, that antagonize whatever audience they may have. They have become the embodiments of the stream they see on their phones. They want their audiences to tap ‘like’ and move on. In the process, they have lost their only selves. They no longer have any links to their own intellectual and spiritual development. They are just pings in the arcade of pithiness.
This makes people so confused, so sad, especially as the anger subsides. They are brutally alone with themselves—they cannot even rely on the self as the primary tender to their mental garden.
Please. Turn it all off. Stop and feel. Stop and think. Be true to yourself. Be loving. Be graceful. Be kind.
We need this more than anything.
