I’m an idiot and I don’t understand this stupid world and that’s my point.
As I type this, of the 162 nation states of the world there are only eleven that aren’t involved some kind of violent conflict weather that be on their owns shores or someone else’s, or simply profiteering from it.
Even the most conservative of climatologists predicts hotter decades to come, sea level rises, floods, droughts, storms and wildfires. That in turn is predicted to bring civil unrest, famine, more wars, less food, failed states and crippled economies.
Big governments and bigger businesses are rife with indecision, corruption, politics appears broken, the public are weary, wary and tired of the lies and deaf ears. Inequality is skyrocketing, the trickle down system seems to of fixed its leaks, break away elites are making up the rules they break, yet its harder for the poor play by them. Our personal privacy and civil liberties haven’t looked this dishevelled for an age, unspeakable violence and injustices and are being committed all over the world on the vulnerable and the innocent.
When you look at it, it can all get a bit glum. Fuck it- go surfing.
Un-fortunately one of the many cruel ironies of surfing is that sooner or later you have come back to dry land. When you look at the big picture; dry land is in a bad way. In fact it’s over-whelming and no matter who you are what you do we are all part of this. No amount of ignorance or do-gooding can absolve anyone from it.
My argument here isn’t about right or wrong, or who does what to whom or how anyone lives their life it’s about the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the world around us.
Technology
The information age, that is us now. The phone in our pockets are the result of about 300,000 year of human innovation and boundary pushing, it represents the technologically sophisticated networks and free flow of information that dominate our age and give it’s name. The availably and manoeuvrability of that information amongst our species has never so been prolific; never before have we had the opportunity to develop such a clear picture of our world.
The Irony is that the picture looking back us is more convoluted and fractured than ever before.
The mass, local and social media networks that saturate our modern world help us to see the world beyond our little bubbles, and yes there are those that will say that you should only worry about your bubble and not what is beyond it, the problem is while that might have been good, stout advice in the past, the world is smaller than it once was. Increasingly our societies are ever more complex, entangled and confusing places and whether we like it or not ‘important’ people are making decisions about our and our offspring’s future so far removed from the consequences and implications of those decisions that it feels like we’re asleep at the wheel.
So apart from desperately depressing you all what am I getting at?
I’m a firm believer in educating yourself before someone else does.
All the recent technological advances in communication have brought us to a place unconceivable to our ancestors, the availability and variety of such vast amounts information on all kinds of subjects places us in a unique position to be able to interpret the current issues of world with ever increasing accuracy, speed and understanding. Perhaps even more importantly the ability communicate with each other on those issues is seemingly infinite. A Hundred years ago these abilities would have been in the realms of the only a handful of the privileged, while some may argue that is still the case, there is little doubt that the world is more interconnected than ever before.
Yet it remains all to easy to get despondent about the state of the world, in fact sometimes it feels like that that’s how the powers that be want us to feel, that those feelings of detachment, helplessness and isolation are manufactured, that the glittering, benign distractions of consumerism and celebrity have a darker purpose.
We have a system that on the whole has served us well, but it is not immune to malfunction, corruption and manipulation and there is a consensus that it is in desperate need of some major repairs.
There are also plenty of reasons to be positive.
Breaking down the plethora of issues out there into bite-size chunks and discovering that there are actually solutions out there, good workable ones - that are so often overlooked and nearly always underfunded is as enthusing as it is liberating.
There are brilliant, talented, selfless, dedicated people out there achieving incredible things trying to fight the good fight for little thanks and even less pay.
The problem is with so much conflicting information out there muddying the waters its hard for their voices to be heard, there are distractors, information gatekeepers, conspiracy theorists, propagandists and mis-informants all jockeying for your attention, there are opposing arguments to all these issues and their solutions.
It all gets rather confusing and loud, makes you feel like an idiot, but try we must, because the alternative is apathy, and that (to plagiarise the musician Ben Howard) will make a fool of us all.
As depressing as it can be at times to watch the news, read newspapers, documentaries, blogs, magazines, films and podcasts I’m of the belief that if you persevere you will see the chinks the armour, you will start to pick through the jargon, news speak and spin you start to see connections and agendas behind the bright shiny gloss. You start to pick out the issues that are important to you, you start to smell the bullshit on all sides of the coin, you hear the notes that don’t get played and see the slight of hand that give the tricks away.
Suddenly it makes it harder to pull the wool over your eyes. You find yourself yelling at the television, you question what you are being told by whom. This in not a trivial thing, this is power. It is the power of informing your choices.
Habitation.
It is my belief that we should all make an effort to understand the issues that affect our times, the reality is it that there are journalists, film makers, citizen journalists, analysts, satirists, writers, artists and activists often risking their lives for very little personal gain to bring us their best and most honest representation of the truths out there.
They aren’t are all working for lizard kings and the NSA, they believe in us, that if they can bring a particular issue to our attention then we might just be able to do something about it.
So many of the world’s injustices have happened because no one was looking.
With so much conflicting information out there its so easy turn your back on it, but its worth wading through it, there are some truly brilliant truths out there, as well as the sad and the tragic, but the more we know about them, the more we understand how this stupid world works, the more power we have.
To solve the problems we face, we have to be able to understand them in the first place. To provide simple answers we have to be able to understand the complexities of the questions being asked.
Ok so that all got a bit heavy, apologies, but what can we do?
In a world is saturated with so many kinds of information from all kinds of sources, all we can do is take each one with a pinch salt, question it, pull it apart, seek to understand the opposing arguments, seek to look for the cracks and read between the lines, find the issues that matter to you and do something about it no matter how small.
Be aware that there things out there designed distract, to pull on your heart strings, to pat your head and rub your belly, that there silent, voiceless horrors and triumphs that need our attention and that above all it is the consistent pursuit of that knowledge and understanding is perhaps more important than arriving at the answers.
A “like” or “share” on face book, five quid to a charity here and there, start a revolution, donate to UKIP if you have too, grow your own veg, shout down a drunken bigot in the pub, chain your self to a tree do whatever you feel you need too, whatever, that’s up to you.
Technology
Destruction.
Interconnected
Habitation.