Misinformation – A rant

There was a time, when we used to receive letters and pick up the telephone which had a wire attached, and stay updated with news by reading newspapers. That was the time when we lived with simple understandings and one of those understanding was that this is real. The letter is truly from cousin didi, the phone call is indeed from our friend, the newspaper has real journalists, is not politically biased, and is making decent money (it need not sell its soul).

We could confidently say that the information we received was credible. We could count on it. Also, no government agency was reading our letters or tapping our phone or monitoring what magazines and TV channels we were watching.

Back to current the current time – Now we don’t know whom to trust. No politician tells anything straight up, they just posture and pretend. Every journalist is politically aligned. Governments and tech giants are monitoring our data and feeding us the “promotional” content including news crafted by political advocates who throw journalism ethics into the trash bin. IT cells and trolls are tirelessly creating and presenting new “history”, new “realities” totally detached from truth, sense, or respect.

We know that journalism in India is attached to politics rather than ethics and truth.  And Facebook and Twitter are so thick with trolls and advocates that almost no one is speaking simple, straight, honest, earnest truths.

As living organisms, our thoughts are molded by a grand paucity of credible data.

But we live without privacy or security. We are fed lies and twisted arguments. And thanks to our reading spans that are growing shorter with passing time, in our quest of keeping up with the flood of information, if by any chance we come across real issues and real significant news, we are most probably going to forget and move to something else… Maybe to the debate about some celebrity’s opinion on an irrelevant matter.

Soon the word ‘trust’ will fade from our vocabulary. Nobody earns it anymore. They demand loyalty instead. They can ridicule rape cases and we should laugh and think it doesn’t matter. They can bulldoze the constitution, silence the voices of dissent, and we should still trust them to be loyal to them, and ignore the facts against them because it has nothing to do with us. They can keep lying to us consistently, and we should stop having second thoughts. Just trust and accept that they do it for a good reason because that’s what the echo chambers called social media are re-iterating.

Enough of this, otherwise,  caring too will succumbed to exist in our vocabulary.

We’ll all be soulless zombies, dead to the world around us.

And the zombie masters will do what they want with us.

I expect to resist. I hope you will, too. We should demand compassion. Demand civility. Demand truth. Demand that trust is earned, and loyalty, too. Demand that the values enshrined in the Constitution be honoured.

This is not a political stance. It is not liberal elitists preaching to the choir, it is a morally responsible position that says taking care of EVERYONE is important. We ought not to allow thugs to stack us on some vertical ranking of priority with demagogue on top, political dynasties (every party has it)  and oligarchs next, politicians and other powerful sycophants next, and the rest of us at the bottom being obedient.

Sorry.

Obedience to nonsense, barbarity, dishonesty, and incivility is not why I was put on earth, I think.

Intelligence, compassion, sincerity, and decency are much better moral anchor posts if we want to live together in peace and well-being.

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