HOLLY DAYS

The year, and Holly Days are over. The last two principles, closing out the Days of Awesomeness trinity, are Forgiveness and Redemption.

This year, the trump phenomenon has ended up as the subject of most of my Holly Days musings on values and healing the world. I view my duty and purpose, as a thinking being, to be to collaborate with the rest of the system to create a more perfect world. While perfect is certainly a limit we can only hope to approach, it’s hard to imagine a less perfect outcome to our election than a Trump Administration. Hell it was near impossible to imagine it at all until it happened.

Yeah, it was a perfect storm of misogyny, racism and populism, and a failure of vision of the democratic party, the coming to roost of a post-industrial and post-wasp America. Hell, maybe it was the phase of our sunspot cycle. But to me, the biggest thing that has changed the most in the world since Obama has been the transformation of media.

Remember that the first iPhone was released in 2007, the first android in 2008. Facebook was a college campus only app in 2005, twitter launched in 2006. Both the internet and Fox News got up to speed at about the turn of the century. We are seeing and hearing at such an accelerated pace it is almost impossible for our understanding to keep pace.

Before all that, on even the most fundamental neurological level, our experience of the world is largely as hoc. We don’t really observe it directly, but instead make sense of a mental model we build of the world, that we update very frequently with our sensory input, but which is mostly built from archetypes we subconsciously distill from our memories. The world is really just a mental construct, that we are coming to understand is constructed mostly under the control of a myriad of unconscious filters and biases.

But even beyond these surprising discoveries about unconscious bias, priming and other insults to free will, we need to remember that the world we feel we know so well, really starts a media construct. I may know my home, my friends, family and workplace from my own first-hand experience, but I also have lots of ideas about features of the world that I really have no direct experience of. I’ve never been to Ferguson Missouri, Standing Rock, Columbine, Palestine, Russia, or any of the other places about whose events  I have very strong opinions, and about which I feel that I know a great deal.

All that I actually know about these important events is what I have perceived via some set of media presentations, all of which I process via all the cognitive shenanigans above. But even more, those presentations are all heavily and carefully filtered and edited before I ever receive them. The most important part is that the various algorithms that govern those filters are almost all based on practical business models and social priorities that have little to do with any of these values intended to better the world that I go on about over Holly Days.

Novelists need us to buy their books, filmmakers need us to watch their movies, and so they pander to our rubbernecking impulses and show us pretty much nothing but car wrecks. Network news outlets need our eyeballs to sell to advertisers, so if it bleeds it leads. Facebook wants us to stick around, so tries to engage our interest. It’s basically all become clickbait, which in turn feeds on the lowest common denominators of our urges and impulses.

Of course it is vastly more complex than this, especially now when we all spend so much time not only consuming but also creating various media, and with each of us trying to filter what we share to meet whatever needs we feel at the moment. Despite the vivid impressions these communications make on us, none of it is really real. The camera always only points one way, the vast majority of the reality we are perceiving remains unseen, most ideas remain unsaid. All is not what it seems.

We desperately need to pull back the emerald curtain and remember that Oz the Great and Powerful is just a fragile little ape just like all the rest of us, just like Roger Ailes, Putin, Trump and Barry. That all our fears and anger are instinctively mediated emotional responses to things we really know only in very select and course detail, all of which has been warped and cooked and recooked and regurgitated in ways we just can’t possible take account of as we react to them. Nothing is anywhere near as simple or as black and white as it needs to become to make sense in 140 characters or even a 500 word post, comment or editorial – in 5 min or even 90 mins of video.

So what does this have to do with Forgiveness and Redemption? I for one, feel a powerful disgust with anybody who could possibly want our president to be a person like Trump, who I feel is a racist, misogynistic sociopath. But I know too that many of the millions of those people who are the object of my disgust, are also disgusted by me as a bleeding heart, malingerer-coddling, sissy libtard. But we do not really know each other at all. We don’t know if America is going down the tubes or if it already has. In fact we live in radically different worlds, worlds we have created as mental models to make sense of the media we have consumed.

Beyond the sort of innocent algorithms, that filter based on generally positive goals of profit, entertainment, engagement and the like, and which only fail us in unplanned ways as they generate echo chambers, feedback loops and opinion bubbles, there is direct activism in a lot of media, which filters based on specific political goals.

Roger Ailes said, “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?” He used that strategy to openly and unapologetically build a pro-GOP media outlet that he felt was needed to counter a bias against his employers, first Nixon and then the Bushes. The impact on the worldview of the people who have been captured, gawking at the poor guy laying in the orchestra pit, cannot be overstated. Obama said that if he believed what was broadcast about him on Fox, he would hate himself as well.

But none of us is immune. MLK chose to cross the bridge from Selma to Montgomery in an effort to manipulate the media and shift public opinion, specifically because he expected a repeat of the violence that had already occurred there, and knew it would be televised and cast the police as the villains and the marchers as victims. I guess I believe that the greater good of the Voting Rights Act was worth putting those folks in danger and intentionally fanning the flames of hatred and violence. The evil of Jim Crow was so clear and present that we may have no doubt in hindsight about the righteousness of this provocation, but neither can we rerun history to see how it might have turned out had a different path been taken.

But the weapon itself: of victimization of sensationalism, can be swung in all directions, and we need to start being more cognizant and skeptical of the technique and try to separate our feelings from reality. Causes dear to my heart get their support by the same sort of fear mongering: the killing of the planet, the violent oppression of the powerless. But when we raise our voices in this way: exaggerating the threats, cherry picking the most dire predictions, we start to lose credibility with the other. Each side becomes increasignly certain they have the facts and the others have been duped. Discourse gets squelched as extremes deepen and separate, and the other seems increasingly evil.

I feel confident that the motives of the leaders on the other side are not as sanguine and righteous as ours on the humanist side, so I continue to stand with my tribe. I see the others leaders as self-interested plutocrats, who are, to be generous, just trying to do right by their heirs. But leaving those motives and morals aside, this phenomenon of selective advocacy still results in us all living in different worlds that we see as more dangerous, with forces more powerful and malevolent than they really are, lined up against us.

And the worst of it, we have met the enemy, and he is us. Now we are all fanning the flames, and adding our own screeching to the feedback and hearing it get louder and louder. So please, lets all try to step back and forgive all those who have succumbed to the frenzy of fear, including ourselves. Let’s try together to redeem ourselves and our democracy by embracing the nuance of all these issues, remembering that things may not be just what they seem. Grains of salt are in order all around.

Happy Holly Days