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Content warning: mild rant ahead…
Image: The Works of Shakespeare / Edited by Howard Staunton / The Illustrations by John Gilbert / Engraved by the Dalziel Brothers / Vol. 3 Published: London: George Routledge and Sons, 1867
It is easy to assume, on social and even quarters of traditional media, that the world is full of angry, hateful people who seem hell-bent on destroying every vestige of human decency. They launch into vitriolic and violent attacks against anyone who holds political office, or people who logically dismantle the lies and hypocrisy of the Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, Hanson supporters. They appear to come from multiple angles – individualism, sovereign citizenship, anti-abortionists, anti-women, anti-LGBTQIA, anti-multiculturalism, anti-vax, neo-Nazism, nut-case religious fascism (the list is not exhausted here) – and while they most likely even hate each other, they seem united in their anger and hatred against all forms of genuine democracy, human care and kindness, equality and international peace and tolerance. They promote their own special group as being more important than any other group, not with pride but with the same anger and frustration as all frustrated and angry minority groups. In social media and some traditional media outlets, you could be easily fooled into believing that these people and their sentiments represent the majority of Australians.
But they don’t.
Just as the loud and obnoxious bully in the schoolyard seems to be the school norm at first glance, these people really are loud and obnoxious bullies. They have always been here, of course, and sadly, unless we can create a perfect world where all parents are good and sound education reaches all individuals, there will always be these people among us. Some of them become rich and either seize leadership or influence our leadership negatively. They are always greedy; always greedy. Even when they have more than the average people around them, they still want more. They are desperate for love and adulation. They want money, lots of money, everyone’s money. And they want power, all of it. And most of all, they do not want any form of opposition that might threaten them. So they become underminers, threatening, bullying – and violent if that’s required too.
They make great characters in stories. But not in real life.
“They who control the truth, control the people.”
And so we come to the problem currently before all Australians. Disinformation in the media and gossip. Who controls the truth?
Those who are educated know that everything presented to us as truth on TV and in newspapers and social media must be carefully and critically considered before being accepted. We might even know that something shared in a particular press network will be skewed by the owner’s political bias, but we should still critically assess it before choosing to believe or disbelieve what is presented. Social media, however, presents a different problem. We may know that owners of those outlets have political and social biases, but we are presented with what is apparently the views of ordinary people like ourselves, people raging against costs of living and immigration and political spending and too many taxes and too many laws and too much whatever there is too much of and not enough of whatever there is not enough of. And because those people seem to be like us, it is very easy to start thinking that maybe they understand our frustrations and anger and maybe the people they seem to support are a better alternative than what we may have been supporting in the past.
Enter the bots and the paid social media workers.
If you have money and access to any form of media, you can create illusions of truth. And social media is flooded with paid people whose job is to shift the illusion of what might be true to whatever view the people paying want it to be. Let’s say I am a local politician and I put forward an argument on my social media account that magpies should be listed as national treasures and protected. I receive a handful of likes. Another person who sees a lucrative opportunity to catch and sell magpies to overseas zoos sees my argument as a threat to their income potential. They are wealthy. Rather than simply debate the issue openly in a democratic environment and let people vote, they pay individuals to attack my social media site with anti-magpie and sometimes personal comments and also attack the people who have ‘liked’ my idea. The comments accrue and anyone coming to the site might start to believe that most people don’t want to support the pro-magpie argument. The truth becomes distorted.
Paying hecklers in the crowd to disrupt a speaker is a very old political stunt, around long before social media or even newspapers. Social media is the digital platform for modern paid hecklers. We call them bots. Some are. Most are not. But they are not common Australians like us. Some are not even Australian citizens but employed hecklers with overseas bases. Their job is simple – discredit the target, spread disinformation and anger, and create a distorted version of the truth (whatever it actually is).
If you have ever (or never) read Shakespeare’s Macbeth, there is a poignant scene in Act 4, scene 2 of the play where Lady MacDuff and her son are waiting for murderers sent by MacBeth to arrive to kill them. Lady MacDuff tells her son that all traitors are swearers and liars and that they must be hung by the honest men. The son’s response is that there are more than enough swearers and liars in the world to hang the honest men instead. The observation is a sad indictment on the state of humanity and yet we certainly live in an age where the swearers and liars seem able to rise to the top of our societies and have the power to suppress, if not outright remove, the honest people. Of course that’s how tyrannies thrive.
In Australia, we live in as close to a genuine democracy as is likely to be possible, with compulsory and preferential voting every three years to ensure everyone’s vote has meaning in finalising who gets to be in government. That means a government (including opposition and independent seats) will be made up of the most preferred representatives available, and that means the values and hopes of the majority of Australians will have a voice in our government. It also means if a government forms and doesn’t fulfil its elected duty to Australians we can remove it at or even before the end of the three year cycle.
No Australian government has been amazing. Neither have we had tyrannies. Some of our elected leaders have proven to be sound statespeople. Some have proven to be idiots. As citizens who can and MUST vote, we are responsible for who gets to govern and for what those leaders do. And we are equally responsible for removing them by voting if they don’t fulfil their promised contracts.
We have politicians in this country whose attitudes and statements beggar my belief. Who voted them in and why leaves me astounded. But they have been elected, sometimes many times by the same electorate, so they clearly represent the majority views, beliefs and attitudes of voters in those places. That’s democracy in action.
I have enough faith in educated Australians that the angry people who do not have the common good of all Australians at heart will never actually achieve more than a handful of seats in our political institutions no matter how much money and disinformation through social and traditional media is thrown at buying votes and power. If only we could remove the hecklers, the boo-ers, the seekers of chaos, the uneducated, the criminal elements: the swearers and liars who do what they do for greed, money and power…
My writing project is making great progress, by the way :)
