Mindset
This week Canada turns 157 years old, and our friends down south will be celebrating their 248th Anniversary of Independence on July 4th. Usually, such events are celebrated with fanfare and fireworks, and most of the time, an appreciation for the long weekend.
Sometimes, with big dates, like any anniversary of importance (our centennial in 1967, or their bi-centennial in 1976) there is more lamenting on the state of the nation, the accomplishments, and the feelings toward bygone years.
For me, this year in particular, I want to reflect on what our nations are supposed to represent to the rest of the world, and what they seem to be losing daily.
Democracy, for all its fractures and fissures, still stands for the ideal of freedom of will and accomplishment. The ideology that any person should have the opportunity to accomplish what they set out to achieve, and live a life they steward themselves.
It’s supposed to represent a place where diversity of opinion, and belief can reside as neighbors, collegially and safely. Without a sense that sharing one’s belief or opinion might result in one’s harm or restraint.
It’s supposed to feel like one can travel and move about with relative ease, without any constraint other than those self-imposed by budget, time, or the constraints agreed upon civilly through means of a government built by the people, for the people.
In other words, we make our own rules and we live by those rules, and if we don’t like them, we use the political constructs built by our forefathers to change them. We amend them, we create new ones, and we delete old, outdated ones.
This is the Kool-Aid I drank for most of my life, I guess it allowed me to feel comfortable that what we had made sense, that what we were doing was somehow better than them, whoever they were.
But throughout the last half of my life, since the early 90s, I’ve seen a slow and insidious degradation of all that I grew up with (however flawed) a slow burn of our flags, and what they represent.
Six significant elements have contributed to the destabilization of our democratic fabric in my estimation, and one more that is just beginning to make it all exponentially worse.
The first is the advent of 24-hour news in the mid-eighties and the politicization of that news through opinion pundits. Ratings and greed began to shift the news from reporting and holding accountable, to defining what was happening through a curated perspective.
Still more disturbing was the monopolization of media by a few media oligarchy who decided to politically bias the news to favor the corporations who would spend millions upon millions of dollars on advertisements. Soon the adoring pundits became all too comfortable with lying simply to make more money.
Cue the internet, which begins to take this reality and redefine it again. Now we have curated content on demand. Now, without us knowing it until it’s too late, we receive confirmation of biased opinions, and we get bespoke news and information to satisfy our beliefs. People get sucked into clickbait rabbit holes only exacerbated by the social media explosion that follows.
The shift in corporate greed instigated in the early 80s saw more and more corporations move their focus from high-quality products and services, manufacturing, and consideration for the workers (never perfect by any stretch, but better than now), to outsourcing manufacturing, downsizing employment, and focusing on shareholder gain. This was the oxygen for the fire that was burning the fabric of our flags.
Social media dropped jet fuel on the fire. No one saw it coming. No one could even begin to contemplate what this new medium would mean. It has done some good, but I’d have to say that for the most part, much of what it has done has been downgrading our social fabric. Most certainly it is reinventing the way our youth sees the world and we are only realizing how this change is truly affecting the next generation of adults and businesspeople.
These ingredients shifted our moral compass. No longer would one need to face their foe and speak their truth knowing there might be ramifications for their bullying or vitriol. All the cowards who wanted to say something however true or false could now build literal empires and followings on the backs of followers who no longer received variable perspective, or actual truth.
Truth?! What is that really?
The cost of this cesspool of fallacy and immorality has been the slow insidious shift of our political leadership from people who sought to contribute through public service (yes, they had their flaws and foibles no doubt) and try to create a better set of circumstances for their children than they experienced growing up.
Getting elected required money and alignment with the private sector, but not to the extent that it does today. Today, the cost of getting elected can only be born of the private sector corporate conglomerates who choose their team and set the rules. Our leaders are owned and operated by those who seek profit over people.
The pandemic amplified this ugly mess, and made everything more evident. It eroded the public trust in institutions, and it seemed that on a daily basis new fractures exposed themselves in public institutions we had trusted implicitly for so long. Was it right for us to doubt, most certainly, but the level it has ascended to at this point renders these institutions dysfunctional and further exacerbates the end user, the public.
On a daily basis, everything seems normal. Life goes on, and we get up each day and get it done, but there is this buzz in the air around us, constant and unnerving, that something is going to break. I don’t know when or how, but something will break and what lies afterward is uncertain.
Cue the next great invention, AI. We don’t really know where this giant experiment with reality will lead, but one thing is certain, there is much that will be different, some for the better, and some for the much worse. The potential to take everything above and simply fabricate a truth, create a false reality, now that is an experiment with much possibility to go wrong.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – 1995
On this Canada Day, I want to celebrate my country and those that I love, but I also find myself at a loss for how we got to where we are, and more difficult to contemplate is how we find our way to something better.
Not to leave you, the reader, with a sensation of bleakness, but I do think our way to something better is instigated by how we treat one another, and what we aspire towards.
Let’s focus more on being better humans to one another each day. Let’s aspire to be better versions of ourselves. Let’s de-emphasize our focus on money and wealth, and shift to a focus on the wealth of health, family, and community. It’s not cliche, it’s common sense.
Let’s make a greater effort to inform ourselves through multiple sources, and embrace critical conversations and curiosity. We must not become complacent, tribal, and protective of what we have. We need to learn more about one another, recognize our differences, and celebrate our similarities. We all want something better for ourselves and for our children.
Here’s to hope.
