In a world that keeps moving and moving at lightning speed, over the years we have created a culture that craves for instant gratification and satisfaction. This culture while is sensually appealing is undermining the very basic foundation of our society beyond our notice.
In my line of work, a lot of things are based on evidence (service improvement) and actual experience (acting). I was taught from a young age that nothing comes quickly but you have to look for them, and if you are willing to look hard enough you will find your answers and thus leads to your personal growth.
However, in a technologically advanced world we are always bombarded with information, be that accurate or not. As a human tendency we tend to filter information to our own liking and gradually developed an information bubble that screens out anything that does not please our eyes or our ears. This tendency of information screening has become worrisome as we can no longer develop balanced views of our world, and thus be truly informed and open minded.
One may say, “If I like something I just like something, why do I need to be open minded and informed?” That is by theory true. If you like chocolate you can eat chocolate to your heart’s consent, it doesn’t bother anyone except you. However, with the predominance of social media and the various platforms available to us, what you like is no longer about what you like. We are living in an age of easy comments on social media. We constantly exercise our freedom of speech to justify our rights to comment. However, in the process we gradually forgot how these ill-informed, one sided comments would affect or hurt our society. When we put something out there, it is no longer about what we like or think but what we tell people this is how things should be according to your own world view. One may or may not notice, every piece of comment floating around on social media will have an effect, no matter big or small. Ill-informed and one sided comments as such do not inform our society but create distorted space in our society that further digresses from the core issue and further distorts views about those issues.
For example, the current marriage equality debate in Australia essentially is not a debate. When we tear this apart and look at it closely, the centre of the debate are arguments such as “The Bible said marriage is between a man and a woman not two person of the same sex”, “I personally do not like this” and “This is not the society I grew up in and should remain so”. None of these arguments are about what positive or negative effect providing marriage equality would have to our society. The negative effects about equating marriage equality put out by the “no camp” about it encourages paedophilia, bestiality and forcing gender fluidity into school programs have no evidence support at all, but are catchy in political means. Even the whole notion that Australia is a Christian country is not correct as Australia had not declared itself as a Christian country constitutionally. What should have been looked at is – would marriage equality brought on issues that we are not constitutionally and legally prepared for? Instead of how a sector of the society wants to see marriage as, we should be looking at some basic human rights, which is what a democratic society is built upon, because anything other than that is irrelevant from a social and constitutional point of view.
Looking further away, the current mess America had got itself into with Donald Trump is another example of such issue. Donald Trump is used to throwing out comments in a manner that sound like fact (hence his casual and assertive tones in his comments), and that is appealing to people who just take words for granted. These people can be intelligent but also intellectually lazy. So as momentum built, fact checking is no longer an important part in Trump’s campaign because people who support him, including the right wing media in the States, do not think fact checking is important anymore. They just want to hear things that fit their world view and for them this is a good President candidate. They will jump to their defence with more off the cuff but flashy comments, and eventually creating this huge void of commentary politics that is doing nobody any good. In fact during the debate on Monday, what Hilary Clinton did was providing fact checking to everything Donald Trump said and claimed he did not say to the audience, which quickly unravelled into a consolidation of exposure of Trump’s lies throughout the whole campaign. The fact that the Trump camp immediately labelling Clinton as nasty and mean because she was exposing all the lies by facts showed that Trump’s campaign thrives on nothing but unfound comments and claims, if not lies. However, the sad fact is that the void the campaign had created is so big now it won’t dent his campaign a bit unless the Republican Party acts, which is not going to happen at this stage.
What saddens me in the current stage of our society is that levelled and balanced evidence based debates are no long that relevant anymore. We have commercial journalist who thrive on catchy headlines and sensational reporting that sometimes are not based on evidence but their own world view or rating attraction potentials. We have media conglomerates that promote ignorance is good and feed their audience with baseless “facts” as actual facts, and these audiences just absorb it like a sponge in the ocean and being nurtured into brain craving zombies to satisfy their brainless hunger for misinformation. When facts and evidence were presented, they were dismissed and criticised forcefully by these media conglomerates trying to suppress them under the disguise of freedom of speech. And even more disappointing is that this kind of practice is championed by some high profile politicians across the world to garner cheap and easy support from the uninformed, which seem to be growing at an exponential rate.
I do not believe there is a Utopia, as humanity had throughout history proved that it is unable to deliver that. But with a bit of sense and sensibility about our society and our world, I do believe that we could live in harmony and with respect at the very least. I will just keep hoping even if it is a fool’s hope at this stage.
