What is Happening With Face Book????????: part one, the people

Over the last few months I've been paying attention to the local "Yellow Vests" Face Book page. I see it as a window into a world that I know absolutely nothing about. 

In case you don't know, the yellow vests originated in France where they were opposed to unpopular fuel taxes plus the removal of a wealth tax that the Socialists had imposed on the very wealthy. In Canada, among other things, they seem to be mostly concerned about a grab bag of issues such as immigration, any attempt to limit industry to deal with climate change, and, more recently, attempts by the government to mandate public health measures such as wearing masks in public. 

I haven't seen any scientific research that would describe exactly who these people are and what makes them tick. Moreover, I don't know how a social scientist could study them because researchers are pretty much limited to using voluntary surveys to collect their data. This means any group that is concerned about secret government conspiracies and holds science in contempt is bound to not produce useful info if you ask them to tell you something about themselves in either a face-to-face interview or a list of boxes they are asked to check off. 

But baring any sort of academic study, I will hazard a hypothesis based on what I've been reading from a wide variety of sources. Take it for what it's worth, but I think that what we are seeing is an inarticulate response to massive social changes. In times past, this would simply be something "below the surface", but because of modern social media and populist political parties it has learned to "punch above it's weight" and become more influential than it should be able.

&&&& 

First, I'll ask you to try to look at the world through the eyes of some of the people I knew when I was young. I don't think that many young people realize how appallingly nasty a lot of people were even a few decades ago. Let's me explain what I'm talking about with the following examples. 

A lot of people used to be very open about their hatred of gays. To cite one extreme institutional example, in 1981 the police targeted the gays of Toronto  through "Operation Soap". This was a huge simultaneous raid on four bath houses under the old "bawdy house" law. This was a vague statute that allowed police to raid and arrest the owners and inhabitants of a building where acts of "indecency" were happening. Since gays were discriminated against in mainstream society, they had created their own subculture, part of which involved the bathhouses. In effect, the police were "creeped out" by gays, so they kicked the doors down of their private clubs, handcuffed them, threw them into jail, and, gave them a criminal record. If any of the people involved resisted, the officers could then beat and potentially kill them.

That's the way mainstream society treated gays back when I was at university. 

I can remember when Rod Stewart's song The Killing of Georgie came out and I heard a lot of vicious, nasty, homophobic things said about him. At the time I didn't think much about this (I was pretty naive and didn't even realize the song was about a gay person until I was older). But in retrospect I can only imagine what it must have been like to be a closeted gay who had to endure this blizzard of hate-filled nonsense. Take a look at Stewart's official video and try to understand how people who had grown in a society that was tremendously homophobic might have experienced it. I suspect a great many thought that this was the absolute end of the world as they knew it.

Now we are used to this sort of thing, but at the time this sort of conscious "gender bending" was absolutely terrifying to a great many folks. It still is for some people, who describe the growth of gay rights not as a move towards making society kinder and gentler, but rather as becoming "immoral".

I suspect that it's this general sense of fear and disgust that underlies the weird theory that people like Hilary Clinton and other top Democrats have created an enormous pedophile ring that kidnaps, sexually abuses, murders, and, drinks children's blood. (It's supposed to prolong a person's life. If you've never heard of this---read up on "pizzagate" and "QAnon".) If you are so strongly and emotionally repelled by the concept of gay rights, it is possible to create some sort of "fever dream" that suggests an evil, child-abusing cabal running society. 

I don't know about you, but I watch Netflix for old Star Trek series
and Turkish soap operas---.

&&&&

It's a lot of work putting out these articles. If you like them, why not consider subscribing through Patreon or Pay Pal? It will give you a warm, fuzzy feeling. 

&&&&

Another way in which society has become different in my lifetime is our racial makeup. When I was young, I never saw a black person until I was in my late teens. There was one Asian family in my village---they ran a Chinese restaurant. There was just one family of First Nations people and one of French Canadians that were at my local school. Racist jokes, use of the "N-bomb", anger against having to learn French at public school, stereotypes about First Nations, etc, sometimes came up in ordinary conversation among the adults. That wasn't very often, though. The fact is that we were pretty much an entirely white community. 

Fast forward to about fifteen years ago and my mom was showing some family Christmas photos to her neighbour---including my then partner from Bombay, my nephew's French wife of Algerian descent, my niece's black son, and, my brother's Mohawk wife and their two daughters. The comment "What the Hell is this? The United Nations?" was made. The photo reflected the fact that the racial composition of the country has changed, and my family was pretty much indifferent to the whole thing. But unfortunately, like my mom's next door neighbour, lots of people aren't very happy about the change. 

This isn't just about race, because race and culture are deeply intertwined. That was what the residential schools were all about---they weren't primarily opposed to people with a specific skin tone. Instead, they wanted to make all First Nations people into slightly darker carbon copies of their white neighbours. That's why they were forbidden to speak their own languages, why their hair was cut, etc. Many of the problems we identify as "racist" aren't per se about the fact of skin colour so much as the cultures that people follow that aren't considered "mainstream". 

This manifests itself among people as fear that immigrants are planning to take over the country and get rid of its "traditional values" and "culture". 

I enjoy eating different types of food. I enjoy learning about different cultures. I like to learn new things about world history. I also believe that there is much room for improvement in both my country and my civilization, and that we could benefit from following the example of others. But if you are someone who believes that the English Canada that you grew up in was pretty much the best that any society could ever be, then you are going to be really creeped-out by multiculturalism. 

&&&&

I have friends in business who get absolutely frothing mad about the way "heavy handed bureaucrats have made it impossible to make a living". This ranges from the way they have to fill out their taxes, to safety rules, to the minimum wage, to environmental regulations, and, more. I'm the last person to defend the way the Canadian bureaucracy works. But I do believe that I can see a reason why there is such a problem. 

The world is a lot more complex than when I was younger. There are a lot more people. Our technologies are a lot more powerful. And, we've learned that we can catastrophically damage the environment if we aren't really careful. We've also decided that injured workers aren't completely disposable, which means that we don't allow people to do all the crazy dangerous things that working people just used to take for granted. As a result, we've passed a lot of new rules and regulations to cut down on the carnage. 

Unfortunately, this increased regulation costs money. And we have periodically elected governments who want to cut taxes, which means that the civil servants who regulate a lot of our lives have to do so with budgets that are usually frozen if not in decline. What this tends to mean is that small businesses who cannot afford to hire lawyers to help them wade through the complex regulations tend to suffer a lot more than large corporations that can simply "swallow" the costs. 

If you are someone like me who thinks he can see a reason for all of this, it is still profoundly annoying to have to wade through mountains of paperwork and wait months (if not years) for something that in recent memory could be dealt with through a face-to-face conversation and an hour of time. But for a person who guides their life by the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition and sees business people as heroic figures, this can seem like a perfidious conspiracy against freedom itself. The difference between the two of us is that I can see how much of this is either necessary or the result of decisions by political parties who are supported by the people most annoyed by the glacial speed to which it has been reduced. 

&&&&

I grew up in a community that had a LOT of churches. Generally this didn't intrude too much on my life as even though we were nominally Baptist, my family wasn't terribly religious. (I'm told the one time a minister came to visit my dad crawled out the window of his study and hid in the barn until he left.) But we did have a Dutch Reform congregation in town that were anti-vaxxers. A child born the same year as me in the next farm behind us died of tetanus from a horse bite because he was never vaccinated against lock-jaw. In high school I had several friends who got polio---again, all members of that one congregation.

People in the community were pissed. "Why", we asked, "can the old-order Amish take their horse and buggies down to the clinic and get their vaccinations, yet these dweebs in their cars and modern lifestyle think that there was something 'ungodly' about it?" I still get annoyed, myself, when I think about it. 

In the middle of this current pandemic I find it really difficult to put myself in the shoes of the people who are fighting against our public health orders. But when I have the required patience and internal clarity, I can remind myself that the world can be a pretty scary place for people who have lost their sense of personal agency. 

Of course, the really big issue is that we really don't have much control over our lives. If we get born with some sort of disability, that defines much of our life. If our parents are poor or rich, white or black, intelligent or dumb, caring or dysfunctional, etc, has a huge impact. So does where we are born: Indian reserve or nice suburb? Canada or Afghanistan? When we come into this world has a huge impact too. (If you doubt this, consider how much more expensive buying a house is now versus thirty years ago.) 

Our health is much the same thing. We can exercise, eat right, etc, and WHAM! you get cancer, a heart attack, mental illness, or, hit by a bus. It's all a question of probabilities and random chance. Most human beings have a problem with this, they want to at least maintain the illusion of control over their life. But the fact of the matter is that human life can be relatively good or bad, often for reasons beyond our control. And it always ends in death---more than sometimes nasty, random, and/or, totally unexpected. 

Unfortunately, there are a lot of very important parts of our culture that are designed to fool people into thinking that if they just work hard enough they can achieve anything that they want. 

Play by the rules? How about the ones against using steroids? 
This comes from an entire page of "inspirational quotes".
Used under the "Fair Dealing" provision of the Copyright Act.

The problem with this idea, of course, is that it's errant nonsense. But unfortunately, we have huge swathes of the population that believe that this is literally true. It's what the whole Conservative movement in North America and our economic system is based upon. But it's also what a great many people increasingly reject.

Consider, if you will, the Black Lives Matter protests. How can you believe that if you just work hard you can achieve anything while at the same time understanding that if you meet the wrong police officer on the wrong day, you will just end up getting killed? How can you teach your children that if they work hard they can do anything---but that when they buy a candy bar in a corner store they should always ask for a bag because that way they can prove they didn't shoplift it if they get accused? (If memory serves, I remember hearing a local black person tell me that this was part of "the talk" that he gave one of his children.)

Underlying this delusional mythology is the great, grand daddy of delusional thinking: religious faith. 

A lot of people have been told that there is life after death, and that if they just believe in God strongly enough, they will end up in paradise. Some of them also believe that this faith will also provide them with happy, wealthy lives on this earth too. (This last bit is called "the prosperity gospel".) These are both ridiculously twisted misunderstandings of a point of view that could make some sense, yet they have---unfortunately---been heavily promoted in modern society. And as such, they help a large fraction of the population become totally unprepared to live their lives with any semblance of serenity or wisdom.

First, let's start off with the original idea.   

The problem with knowing that we all die, often in an extremely unpleasant way, is that if we fixate on it, it could cast a pall on every moment of our life. And who wants that? So paradoxically, if you really want to live a good life you need to, on some level, think that you are going to live forever. But if you actually believed that there would be a tendency to keep putting off today in favour of tomorrow---which would create a whole new set of problems. That means that at the same time you need to act as if today is the last day of your life. 

Run this paradox through popular religious culture (And don't forget that until very recently people would be treated very harshly for publicly being at odds with Christian orthodoxy) and you end up with the idea that when we die we go to paradise as long as we really, really, really believe in God. 

The issue for the people of my childhood who refused vaccinations was that their church hierarchy told their congregation that part of the "really, really, really believing in God" was not being vaccinated. 

Remember that "prosperity gospel" thing? Well, one of the pillars of capitalist society is the idea of the "invisible hand" which says that if people really believe in the free market all the individual choices that each consumer and business person makes will equal out and create the best of all possible worlds. Add this idea to the "faith thing" from a confused sort of pop spirituality, and you get the idea that if you really, really, really believe in the invisible hand it will make you rich and your country "Great!" or "Great Again!" 

The problem for people who believe in this nonsense is that it paints you into a corner. You aren't supposed to have any doubts or investigate any evidence that might undermine this worldview. Unfortunately, they really, really, really want to believe all this stuff but they can also see evidence to the contrary. So to prove how much they really, really, really believe they will make a big fuss about how completely wrong the evidence really is. (The psychologist Bob Altemeyer who spent his career studying conservative leaders and their supporters wrote that he's found out that a surprising percentage of the most vocal supporters of fundamentalist Christianity actually will admit that they don't really believe in God or life after death. They just say so to be part of the "group think".)

Along comes COVID-19. Whether or not we shut down society, ask everyone to wear masks, and, eventually tell everyone to get vaccinated all comes down to science. The virus couldn't care less about the spiritual values that you've built your life around---it just "is". And just like death, poverty, and, injustice it requires some sort of spiritual "work around" for the people who have never reconciled themselves to the fact that life isn't fair and that they are going to die. So they flail around looking for evidence either that the virus is a conspiracy or that it just isn't all that bad. And Face Book is quite happy to supply all the nonsense they are willing to consume.

&&&&

There's more to this story than just the way a minor segment of our society thinks. There's also the question of how they are being whipped into a frenzy by shysters, mega-corporations, and, questionable political organizations. But this is article is already long enough. I'll have to continue the story some other time. Until then---.

Moreover I say unto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!