Throughout history, humans have tried to better themselves. They have gone from a short, brutal existence in primitive conditions via controlling fire, harnessing electricity and championing human rights, to supersonic flight, connecting everybody through computer screens and curing fatal diseases. Humans have forever been improving others' conditions, but they have not always raised their standards on a personal level.
What do I mean? Well, look at the vast majority of inventions. They have been created to make our lives better, because we are as a species particularly lazy. We will go to great lengths to reduce the need to go to great lengths. What these inventions, discoveries and adaptations do not do, however, is raise standards of intelligence and behaviour in people. They unfortunately go for the lowest common denominator, and if that's not available, the shortest and crudest explanation. This is what we need to correct now.
What has laziness got to do with it?
Well, look around you. People strive for the latest gadgets and machines to make their lives easier. They want them so badly, they'll go out to work for 8 to 12 hours a day to earn the money to pay for them. It's quite a paradox actually, when you think of it. We invest in clothes driers so we don't have to spend twenty minutes hanging up clothes on a line and wait several hours before removing them. Some of us then hire people to iron them for us.
We buy cars to go shopping even if there is a supermarket just down the street so we don't have to cart a couple of bags of acquisitions a few hundred metres, even if a shopping trolley costs a fraction of the price and the exercise would do us good. We buy kitchen appliances so we don't have to whisk, mix, stir or beat food ourselves, and we programme a destination into a map-reading machine so that we don't have to use our brains to read maps ourselves.
We constantly seek to take the effort out of our lives but we run ourselves into the ground getting there. We strive for simplicity in everything, though, including how we consume information, which is why many people are more willing to accept a snazzy slogan from a demagogue than listen to a full-length explanation from an expert.
In fact, people seem to have grown weary of professionals and experts altogether. And this is where the danger lies - politicians, big business people and captains of industry don't get where they are today by being lazy. The cleverest and most ambitious ones use the language of the lazy consumer to persuade, cajole and steamroll their targets into buying their products or supporting their policies. They can make people dance to their tune and wear clothes according to the weather they make. They get out of bed before they've even got into their pyjamas.
I am not saying this is nefarious behaviour; I am saying that they know how to play people's tunes. And there are a lot of people willing to be led. The fashion industry is the most extreme example of this - some rich tycoon with a clothing idea sends a faithful acolyte on TV to say "this is the latest fashion accessory", and before the Y in "accessory", it is sold out and a clamour for more engulfs the shops. If many ordinary people are willing to listen to this useless information about fashion which, let us be frank, has little or no impact in the whole scheme of things, they will of course treat important topics in the same way. And this goes for voting patterns too.
I would go as far as to say that the brutal treatment demonstrated in public voting shows on TV (the hollow commiserations handed out by the hosts, the cruel wait before the announcement, the gossip on the spin-off shows and in the newspapers, etc.) have made many people collectively immune to the feelings of others. People talk about these victims of fame as if they were characters in a soap opera. Added to that, we see evidence of people filming others involved in accidents or being attacked without intervening. Our civilisation is becoming immune to people's suffering.
And this is also reflected in recent political events.
The first that I can bring to mind is the refugee crisis in the Middle East and its spillage into Europe. Leaders of countries are ordering massive fences to keep out people fleeing for their lives and accusing them of carrying diseases into Europe, or worse, of shielding terrorists in their numbers. The problem is the opposite opinion is not an effective counter-argument - that we should allow these people in regardless is not going to win over many neutrals. This whole débâcle has sunk into mud-slinging and blaming each other for either being too hard or too soft. But those in positions of power are too proud to let go of their pet hates and any productive debate is stifled by the constant accusations. Western politics is sinking to lows that will take revolutions to amend.
Furthermore, we can point to the US-Mexico wall that the current incumbent of the White House is so adamant will be an effective antidote to illegal immigration. And this is where human laziness really reaches its nadir - symbolic gestures are seen as effective solutions to people's ills. For that is what the wall on the southern border of the US will be - a symbolic gesture, nothing more. People will go over it, under it, through it and around it. And symbolic gestures are happening everywhere. They stem from human laziness and unwillingness to investigate too far into something in case it turns out to be wrong.
Take the Brexit bus.
Never was such a succinctly effective untruth so widely used, and accepted, to justify an argument. The other side of the coin, though, cannot be emblazoned on the side of the bus so successfully:
And herein is the underlying problem - the arguments for and against any subject generally have on one side an attractive soundbite that makes perfect sense to people who like their news in short paragraphs; whilst on the other, a complicated narrative with detailed explanations can confuse or bore the average reader. Guess which story is likely to garner the most supporters...
And that is the disadvantage of those who seek to explain the truth and justify their answers in more detail - they can easily be drowned out by heckling from the opposition, or mocked for their unwieldy explanations. Short, snazzy slogans are the domain of commercial retailers and sports teams, but the political classes are getting in on the act, and taking their ideologies, warped or not, to the wider public. Unfortunately, and I don't think I am going to gain many friends by writing this, but there is a large section of the population that is easily led by simplistic messages that claim to be able to improve their lives, the very basis of commercially successful strategy. Taking this out into the real world is both reckless and unfair. The truth becomes blurred by people wishing it true, no matter how false it is.
The BBC has recently set up a Permanent Reality Check team to look into stories and claims that have been flagged as containing an element of untruth or spin. As you will see from its detailed clarifications, the answers are more complicated than the text they were originally packaged in.
If we are ever going to break the cycle of untruth, we have to simplify the message of truth. how could Brexit have been prevented? Simple, positive messages showing the benefits of the EU would have garnered a lot more support than the Osborne-Cameron fear campaign. Take the Facebook group WhyEurope - they have been developing positive slogans in support of Europe for a while now, and many of them bring the positive side of the story into a far more easily comprehensible light:
"Europe because...
We all have better things to do than waiting at borders."
"Europe because...
You receive the same medical care abroad as at home."
"Europe because...
I don't want to pay custom fees on Amazon"
"Europe because...
it's like being rich - you have 28 different places to live."
"Europe is like a window...
Often invisible, but you're gonna miss it when it's broken."
If only this group could have got this type of message out before the Brexit referendum... But of course, these positive features do not ring with people who aren't as greatly affected by them as they are by more pressing needs, like their health, social security, employment and domestic lives. Which is why their disenfranchisement will lead them to seek scapegoats and form up behind a cheerleader who will promise them sunnier times ahead, even if that may clearly not be true.
Populism does not need to speak the truth; it needs to press the right buttons. Which is why Donald Trump and his team could think up non-events like the Bowling Green massacre that never was, and the much-derided Sweden incident. People want to believe in Area 51 cover-ups and refugee rape stories in Germany. They want to believe it so badly because they are desperate to be right for a change. They have spent decades being told they are at the back end of society, misfits, plebs, rabble, and now the Establishment is teetering on the brink of self-inflicted destruction, those who get out of bed early on the opposing side are seizing their chance.
The only way for the current political class to salvage this is to shine an equally positive light on the future rather than the incessant sad music being they play while forcing through austerity policies on the poorest of society. Governments insist there is no money for schools, public transport, healthcare, welfare and job creation, yet there is ample money for defence and meaningless vanity projects. The current batch of politicians like Schäuble, May, Juncker, Rajoy, Hollande and recently Renzi and Cameron, seem (or seemed) to be doing very little on the surface to quell the fears of the impending downfall of Western civilisation, just carrying on as normal while all around ordinary people are growing tired of hearing about the closure of hospitals here and the reduction in police there, while third countries that are not so friendly to the West are now so obviously trying to infiltrate the system by subterfuge. People are looking for a sign that everything is all right and these dark times will pass.
If the West is serious about keeping up its standards then it needs to find some visionaries and statesmen and women from somewhere. The space is full of politicians acting like glorified civil servants, more worried about their own opinion poll rating than doing what is needed to re-calibrate the situation; any shining lights are extinguished by being marginalised by power-hungry politicians or disillusioned by the rigidity and intransigence of the political system.
It's time someone with a positive vision and two very sharp elbows stepped up before the populists get there first.
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