Fake News, Fake Outrage

“There are only two kinds of people who can drain your energy: those you love, and those you fear. In both instances it is you who let them in. They did not force their way into your aura, or pry their way into your reality experience.” - Anthon St Maarten

I’ve always had a profound love of comics and in particular the Marvel Universe. Now before anyone gets riled up - which as a comic book nerd I know can happen – this isn’t a debate on the greatest superhero or the finest comic book franchise (It’s Spiderman and Marvel if you’re interested by the way). I’m mentioning my love for comics because I’ve always had a fascination with societies characterised by oppression, squalor and totalitarianism with megalomaniacs bent on world destruction, foiled by plucky underdogs; and environments like these were, if not the backdrop, certainly a key ingredient of the stories I was being told in the pages of The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange, 2000AD and later on in the classic Graphic Novels The Watchmen and The Dark Knight.

My ‘true’ reality was too often populated with tangible and immediate horror stories with real victims, no discernible justice and ostensibly no heroes, so reading about the exploits of the teenage Peter Parker as he basically tried to be a good person and stand up to bullies, was a salvation. ‘With great power comes great responsibility’. I learnt that at a very young age and I believed in those words not because of a teacher, politician or some other “leader”, but because of a character in a comic. With my limited perspective, experience and understanding of the world at that time, having good and evil distilled in to a relatively distinct and simplistic territories reassured me. It gave me hope. And my elders in the family tell me that it was the genesis of a dystopian worldview that has reached its zenith today. Today being the day of Brexit. Of Trump. Of ‘Post-Truth’. Of ‘fake news'. Of the walking dead. Sorry, forget the last one, that hasn’t happened yet – or at least not literally.

Yet I don’t feel that’s actually me. If I was the Nostradamus they claim me to be, I’m sure I’d be feeling pretty smug about now and I’m not even content. If I were content I’d be happy in spite of the successes and failures of democracy. And democracy is totally ****ing up people’s lives right now. Let me rephrase that - people are totally ****ing up people’s lives right now but since we, the people, are essentially the core component of democracy my earlier sentiment still holds true. Just like so many of the apocalyptic visions predicted in those fascinating comics I read (and still do if given the chance) people become indolent, complacent, ambivalent and let’s face it, idiotic regarding the truth when they are given the illusion of security, and they turn in on themselves and each other when and of that security is threatened. Whether that’s by a real or imaginary threat, the outcome is the same – people look for someone or something to blame. And there’s usually some **** only too happy to point them in the direction of an easy target.

That’s part of the problem we have as human beings, asides from an overly inflated sense of our worth. We need someone who we can blame because we just can’t – no we don’t – accept that everything that happens to us is our own doing, that it’s our fault individually and collectively. Which is why we have the concept of God and the Devil. Thank God for the Devil because without him we wouldn’t have an excuse for the multitudinous crimes we commit every second of every day. Objectivity requires a degree of patience and discipline, which sounds like hard work and man oh man, do we not like hard work in the Western world. That’s for ‘developing’ countries and immigrants. And probably women. Possibly children. So long as they're Third World children. But being objective is the only way to assess a situation and make a decision, a choice or to take a moral stand.

We all need to face up to some facts (sorry, I know facts are a dirty word nowadays) about the societies that we have blithely sleepwalked in to creation. The dystopian nightmare is here today. It’s real. We already have George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ surveillance society. ‘Designer’ babies made to order predicted by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World may be created in the shadows but they are created nonetheless. In the eighties, 2000AD predicted the creation of Mega-Cities and that we would kill ourselves with sugar. The demise of rural communities, exponential growth of cities and the increase in obesity worldwide bears testament to their prescience. There are myriad examples if we can be bothered enough to be objective and open our eyes and ears but more importantly, our hearts and minds.

So with the sudden concern about fake news, I’d suggest that we need to be more concerned with fake people, the ones that lie to your face even though you both know they’re lying, the ones that promise you freedom but you wake up with golden handcuffs. I think some of us call them politicians. I’m not suggesting fake news doesn’t matter. I’m saying it’s always been there but the difference now is the Internet. It’s a bit like deaths in Police custody. Blacks and other minorities have known of the harsh inequities of the criminal justice system for eons but now we’re believed because it’s caught on camera. Fake news has existed since before Columbus landed in the wrong hemisphere 500 years ago and claimed to discover a new land. The problem with fake news is that it’s becoming a lazy adjective describing anything that people disagree with and this creates a pyretic environment in which reasonable discourse does not occur.

So here we are, running around hysterically and professing not to know how to solve the problem of, well, lying basically. Because that’s what fake news is. The answer is simple but the action isn’t easy. The answer is to take some responsibility for what we read, access and choose to propagate. You can get disheartened on numerous occasions, but you are not a failure until you start blaming someone else and cease to try.

So let's all try. Let's try to think for ourselves.