Yes, you do have amnesia.
And so do I.
Facebook is a necessary evil for me. There are a couple of online groups to which I belong that use Facebook as their only platform. Without being on Facebook, I would not be able to participate.
I barely went near Facebook during le régime de l’Orange* (2017-2020.) In fact, for almost three of those years, I de-activated my account.
*I was looking to make this a play on ancien regime. In a serendipitous twist of translation, it actually translates to: the Orange Diet. Ha!
It (not being on Facebook) was, in a word, bliss. Apparently, I went back on when the pandemic began.
La vita algorithma
Since we are all living la vita algorithma, Facebook has served up “Memories” to me from that time. I’ve been receiving some “memories” from four years ago. Which, if you do the math, is just about the time that the pandemic really became serious.
Although it’s only four years ago, I have trouble remembering that time.
Why has my memory, usually something I can depend upon, become so … compromised? Why don’t I remember these things?
When I think of that, it reminds me that, before the media sh-tshow over masks and ivermectin and the “tyranny” of masks took over, the pandemic was about loss and pain.
It should still be about loss and pain.
But breaking news has changed that.
Breaking news is the leading cause of amnesia.
There is nothing BUT breaking news, in both print and cable media.
Clearly, this is problematic. There was a time—and not too long ago— when news arrived in order of importance. That is no longer the case. In order to keep our attention, everything is breaking, like waves upon the shore.
Here is the business model for news delivery these days:
Induce collective amnesia by maximizing present fear.
It’s an easy model to execute. Make every news story “breaking news,” inject some fear into it, and voila!
Our minds, unfortunately, are not wired to dismiss fear. So the room in our brain that could be thinking of …oh, I don’t know … IDEAS becomes atrophied. Shrunken to the size of a cashew.
In the Brothers Karamazov …
…Ivan, the most rational-minded of the brothers refers to humankind’s intelligence this way:
The impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man (sic).
This is nowhere more apparent than out inability to take in the flood of information that hoses us down every day. This creates a paradoxical dance: between what we know and what we think we know.
There is a terrific TV series, from the BBC, called The Capture. (It’s also on Peacock.) Its first season, which we watched during the opening months of the pandemic, was unsettling. The second season took three long years to arrive. We’ve just finished watching it.
Amazing how much has changed in those four years.
Quick summary of The Capture:
The British government has created a program called “Correction” which allows for real-time video feed manipulation. In other words, what you see isn’t what is actually happening. It is what ”[insert nefarious force here]” wants you to see. Feeds—cable, CCTV, on-air—are hacked and “corrections” are inserted.
This seemed a little far-fetched at the time, something that, maybe—maybe—could happen in, what, the 2030s?
We are almost there now:
This is one of those turning points that happen every five hundred years or so that strain the human capacity to understand what is happening. Things start to speed up; we have trouble keeping up; the “known” starts to shrink; there is a stampede toward the alleged security of fundamentalism.
There is also the turn toward conspiracy theories.
Many of us are baffled by people who espouse wild ideas about drinking the blood of children or “diversity” causing container ships to crash in bridges. But Karen Douglas, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom, recently wrote the following:
… “people are attracted to conspiracy theories when important psychological needs are not being met.” She identified three such needs: “the need for knowledge and certainty”; the “existential need” to “to feel safe and secure” when “powerless and scared”; and, among those high in narcissism, the “need to feel unique compared to others.”
Conspiracy theories bridge the gap between the known and the unknown.
If only they worked.
This is, in many ways, what I wrote about in “Honest To God”: Our tiny minds trying to comprehend something as enormous as God. And coming to the conclusions that we can’t.
Speaking of which, here’s the cover:
Don’t hold me to this, but it looks like this fall for publication. Advance Reader Copies are in the works. If you like more information, you can go here: Honest To God.
As most of you know, I use video when I post new songs.
I have to use stock video because, well, I’m not a Hollywood studio. Once and a while, the footage actually looks like it isn’t stock, but made for the song.
I think that kinda happened last week:
You can listen and download “Promises Broken” for free here:
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Thank you for reading! Apologies in advance for typos. (I am a dyslexic proofreader!)
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The song was—and this is after Med School, so it doesn't fall into the Black Hole—"Everybody Wants To Rule The World." And yes, rugby would have been a good choice. A bloody nose is always funny. On someone else.
Jeff, next time I do something near you (I do get into the Boston area every now and again), I'll absolutely let you know. Twenty-five years, my friend!