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.

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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---.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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!

Public Mobilization

In the last few weeks I've had some experiences that I think might indicate a pretty important issue that I think just about everyone else seems to have missed. I thought a quick discussion of this might help others articulate something that might be on the tips of their tongues without being able to clearly identify the problem.

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As regular readers might remember, I wrote a post a while back explaining just what "being on a war footing" meant during WWII. The idea is that we could speed up our efforts aimed at avoiding catastrophic climate change if the governments of the world got off their collective butts and started acting like they really thought that we are in a climate emergency. As a result, I've become something of a Diogenes wandering through Guelph trying to find a politician or bureaucrat who wants to put some effort into mobilizing the public to deal with the climate emergency.

Vainly looking for an official in support of public mobilization?
Diogenes Looking for a Man by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein.
Public Domain image c/o the Wiki Commons. 

I made this question a couple weeks ago at a private meeting between Lloyd Longfield and a delegation from the Green New Deal and also a couple nights ago to the past Environmental Commissioner, Diane Saxe, during a city event. In both cases the result was the startled look of a deer in the headlights of an oncoming car plus a question to the effect of "what do you mean?". I don't think I was totally out to lunch, however, because in both cases at least one other person referred to my question in their's---which suggests to me that I'm not the only one wondering why people of good will in positions of authority simply won't try to engage the public to help with the climate emergency.

Diane Saxe: "Public Mobilization?
What the heck does that mean?"
Photo by Ontario government,
c/o Wiki Commons.

Don't get me wrong. My read of both Lloyd Longfield and Diane Saxe is that they are both really good people who care about the climate emergency. But as I see it, they are both people who come from a background that specifically selects against people who think about how to mobilize the public to deal with a specific issue. 

From what I've heard Mr. Longfield say, it seems that he comes from a background in engineering and business. Those are both fields where communicating with the public is not nearly as important as dealing with a specific problem that you solve either through mathematics and research, or, one-on-one deal making. 

Similarly, my understanding is that Ms. Saxe comes from a legal background where she worked as a mediator. And the absolute last thing that mediators ever want to do is draw the public into the conversation. And, as I've pointed out with an earlier post titled What is an Environmental Group?, most environmental organizations consist of a small number of professionals who fundraise for their campaigns either through a professional fundraising company, solicit donations from a small number of hyper-rich donors, or, sub-contract for the government. So her experience with environmental organizations would similarly ill-prepare her for understanding how to mobilize the public in favour of a specific issue. 

Another aspect of this comes from a future story that I'm preparing about parliamentary reform. In

Michael Chong:  "Don't expect modern
parties to nominate rabble rousers!"
Photo c/o his office. 

conversation with Michael Chong he pointed out that the independence of local Electoral District Associations in Canada has withered away to the point where the party leader holds all the real power when it comes to nominating candidates. This means that no one who amasses a profile and following in a riding on the basis of engaging the public would ever get a nomination---simply because that would almost by definition mean that she is not a "team player" who would willingly submit to party discipline. 

And if almost no one in Parliament is going to understand and support the idea that the average Canadian needs to "get riled up" to avoid catastrophic climate change, then there certainly aren't going to be any bureaucrats who will either. I worked for decades at the University of Guelph---which I nicknamed "the last outpost of the Soviet Union"---so I understand the bureaucratic mindset very well. The absolute primary responsibility of anyone in any sort of institution is "cover your butt". Generally the first response of an appointed official is to limit public engagement through things like controlling their access to information---not encourage them to actually do something!

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What's especially frustrating about this refusal to use one of the biggest weapons in the government arsenal is the fact that the people who want to make the world into a fiery inferno have no such qualms. Doug Ford is putting those Dao-cursed stickers on gasoline pumps.

Doug Ford has no problem at all with public engagement aimed at
helping the human race commit suicide! Image from a government website. 

And, of course, Jason Kenney---the Fuhrer of Alberta---announced yesterday that $30 million is going to be spent creating a propaganda machine touting the "true story" of how the tar sands are nothing but butterflies and rainbows. This is their first creation:

The problem with progressive political parties refusing to do any public mobilization is that the forces of evil have no similar qualms. And if you leave the field open, a lot of people will simply accept Ford and Kenney's nonsense if they don't see any push back. This creates a natural "base constituency" that will vote against any political party that does try to do something to stop total catastrophe. By not pushing the case for rapid mobilization to end fossil fuel use, progressives simply don't build their own core constituencies.

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So what would it look like if the government actually tried to mobilize the public to fight climate change? There is the example from WWII---.

For example, the government could try to cut fossil fuel use by encouraging car pooling or using public transit.

How about "When you ride alone you help destroy
your children's future"?

Or, it could create green future bonds to pay for programs like electrified public transit.

Children in a blighted, over-heated landscape?
Don't let your children fry, buy transit bonds!

How about a campaign aimed at encouraging people to invest in a greater efficiency life-style in order to create a fossil-fuel free future? 

People might object that I'm just rehashing stuff that's already been done. We have had energy-star appliances, financial incentives to put up solar panels, etc. But none of these have been sold emotionally. Instead, they've all been marketed through financial inducements. Indeed, the Liberals have made no attempt whatsoever to say that dealing with climate change is the right thing to do, or, that we have a moral imperative to do it---instead, ordinary folks could be excused if they thought that the entire thing just comes down to the carbon tax.

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I'll admit that I'm a little angry in this post. I've been getting increasingly steamed over the last few weeks as I see person after person refuse to admit the gravity of the situation that the human race is facing. People should throw their "objectivity" and "manners" out the window and tell the flat-out truth that fatuous dorks like Jason Kenney and Doug Ford are "fiddling while Rome burns". 

An additional minor truth that I am angry about is that people should be willing to pay for their news if they don't want to live on a diet of pablum and spin. If everyone who reads local news were to contribute a dollar a month to the news sources they like, Guelph could have a rich and lively independent news scene. Instead, most folks are content to just get the free stuff and let the advertisers tell you what they want you to hear. 

The difference is that if you pay for the news, you are the customer. If you get it for free, you are the product that the publisher sells to the advertiser. 

What would you rather be? Patreon and Paypal make supporting indie media very easy. 

The added benefit from this business model is that your news doesn't hide behind a paywall, which means that people who genuinely can't afford to support it still get it for free. 

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I get it. If you've spent your entire life looking at numbers, mediating disputes, negotiating contracts, implementing government policies, etc, emotions are scary, scary, scary. Emotional people yell at you. They don't make sense. They just make everything difficult.

But emotions are what get people to actually change their behaviour. And we can't solve the climate crisis simply through technology. People are going to have to change the way they live their lives. We can't just switch out internal combustion engines and replace them with electric ones and continue the "happy motoring" lifestyle. Increasing numbers of people will have to accept that they are going to have to live in higher density housing serviced through public transit. (Yeah---no backyard for the kids to play or drives in the country. Get used to it!) We won't be able to fly overseas every year or even every other year anymore. Things will have to change, and while a carbon free life doesn't have to be any less convenient or pleasant, a lot of people are very afraid of any significant change in their lives. If we don't work at emotionally engaging with people, we are not going to get them to commit to the program.

Instead, what I've heard over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, again for about 30 years is that "we have to make baby steps" and that "people can't handle the truth". Well, we are getting very close to "taking baby steps" over a damn cliff! It's time to be honest and emotional with the public. And the government needs to be part of that effort.

When other people pushed Diane Saxe on the need to engage the public, she did suggest that there are "groups" out there that can do that. She lauded "Fridays for the Future". But that's a bloody cop-out. In WWII no one in the government suggested that if we really wanted to stop Hitler we needed to get the school children out making a fuss. Instead, the government made the decision that they needed to get people cranked-up so they'd buy victory bonds, recycle scrap metal, grow their own veggies, accept rationing, etc. And they hired the very best people from the artistic community to fashion the images and ideas necessary to get everyone "with the program". (For crying out loud, the BBC even hired George Orwell to write propaganda for their Eastern service.)

We live in a sea of advertising. Every advertisement that people watch is implicitly telling folks that "everything" is OK. That there's no need to worry. Well, that's a damn lie. And we need some force in society to push back against this mountain of misinformation. And the only public force large enough to do this is the government. So if you have a chance to "bend the ear" of a politician, I'd suggest you bend it in the direction of trying to actually using public campaigns to get people emotionally engaged with the climate crisis. Because I simply do not think that we will be able to actually get the job done unless we do.

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Furthermore I say onto you, we need to deal with the climate crisis!