Holding On to Stories of Ourselves

Some of my colleagues in the US are hurting pretty badly right now.

On Monday, I wrote about how poorly legacy media is acting, by gamifying aspects of democracy that are already deeply frayed. I tried to focus on the through-line across states—from how South African and French results were anti-democratically reported to suggest that anything less than absolute majority wins were dangerous, to how The New York Times and Washington Post made choices after the first US presidential debate that have shaped subsequent news cycles in a reckless and manipulative way.

But it’s difficult to write about US news without playing into its all-consuming cycles.

And that, in turn, can add to the despair, which then manifests in unexpected ways.

A few months back, when I was writing about how legacy media failed Western audiences by stirring up outsize fears of war between Israel and Iran absent critical diplomatic context, and when I then highlighted the sequence of news events that these same forums leveraged mere days later to fan the flames of panic around campus protests, I ran into a surprising set of responses. There were some folks who saw anything less than eleventh-hour rhetoric around either the Iranian-Israeli standoff in mid-April, or the subsequent (again, days-later) notion that Iran and its proxies were behind all antiwar campus movements in the US, as a sign of me being a psy-ops agent or at least “useful idiot” in a greater conflict between Iran and the US.

At the time, it was scary. Huge McCarthy-era vibes were rolling off a lot of folks in my North American circles, who in their Jingoist paranoia were seeking a kind of political purity that’s usually ascribed to the “PC police” (in another era) or the “woke” (in ours). It’s never fun to be on the receiving end of claims that you’re trying to ruin society by advocating for greater attention to how media is shaping notions of social crisis, and I withdrew for a week or so from some circles for my own sanity.

But during that time-out, I went from being disturbed by the all-or-nothing, with-us-or-against-us mentality to being fascinated by the behaviour. I realized what had made folks so quick to cast aspersions on me for what I was writing, and simply put, there was a lot of pain driving people to zero-sum or otherwise rigid, binary thinking.

I have never been anything but crystal clear in my advocacy not only for humanism, but also for pluralist democracy: a way of thinking about politics that views dissent constructively, seeks to improve human agency through accurate and empowering data collection, and is capable of holding a multitude of ideas in tension.

But when people are stressed out, and when they are afraid, even if they say that they are “pro-democracy”, and even if they believe that they’re fighting for democracy, they’ll often lose their ability to imagine democracy in anything but absolutist terms.

And my whole point, when I saw how badly the Iranian-Israeli standoff was being reported in April, was that legacy media was making people afraid. It was stressing them out, by failing to provide enough information about all key actors and their recent histories of local standoff to help average Western audiences assess the actual risk of all-out war at that difficult moment in regional politics.

When the Media Makes Context Harder

This was especially true for some of the US folks who came to the conclusion that I must be some sort of useful idiot (at best) or deep plant (at worst) for the “other side”.

What I hadn’t fully accounted for, though, was just how much stress my US colleagues were already experiencing during a terrible election year. Russia, Ukraine, China, Iran, Israel, Gaza, European far-right movements, campus antiwar protests… everything reported in US media was being filtered through one lens above all else:

How will this affect the November election?

And that’s a painful lens to live with day in and day out. It strips citizens of their agency around other issues. Don’t express any concerns about your elected leaders! Do you want to demoralize voters in November?! And definitely don’t rock the boat about X, Y, or Z—or it’ll be your fault when the Democrats lose and democracy dies!

I’ve been trying to write on media literacy, and to note when representations of world events a) fail to capture the complexity of robust democratic societies, and b) deny average citizens a real sense of agency (or at least clarity) amid terrible situations.

And I don’t always get it right, because I can’t always get it right. I can’t always anticipate just how much people are already living at the breaking point. I can’t always know when their advocacy for democracy, in the abstract, is now coming at cost to those forms of democratic thinking we most need to address the greatest problems we face as a species, and as a set of interconnected societies.

Below the fold, for subscribers, I’m sharing a “slice of life” example of what happens when our sense of self falls apart. On one level, it’s simply a wee essay about a street person in my barrio, with elements that will sound familiar to people who’ve encountered mental health crises in the unhoused around them, too.

But I also think it serves as a reminder that the line between “sanity” and “madness” is always fragile, and easily exacerbated by the broader social uncertainty. Whether the trauma we’re awash in is personal, or taking place on a broader level, it’s going to have a real impact on our ability to see ourselves and each other with the calm, care, and grace necessary to weather our struggles ahead.

Our world is getting warmer, too, and this is also negatively impacting our sanity. Our collective proclivity to see enemies everywhere, and to be less ready to defend genuine democratic thinking, is only going to grow in the coming years, in lockstep with greater geopolitical unrest and direct environmental pressures on fragile biochemistry.

We have so much to do to build resilience for the coming psychological warfare.

And that work has to start with how we forgive ourselves, and each other, whenever we make mistakes and/or lose our darned minds at key junctures along the way.