Cherry picking
How division between people is made/
From a young age, we have been taught that following rules is moral. We go to school, we watch television, we listen to politicians to learn what is right and what is wrong. The system itself teaches us to follow its rules. We draw our morality from following rules. Moral… Such a strong word, such an irresistible word. We can’t fail to be moral. It is such a huge part of our identity. The vital one!
But what if rules are based on fear, and so being afraid means being moral?
The collective social anxiety had been growing for decades, but within the last two years, we have become a society excessively driven by fear. The system which focuses on wars, money and ad hoc solutions has created fear. The media, one of the main pillars of that system, have had a huge role in that process. I recently wrote about how the media creates fear by focusing on extreme events and thus turning those events into our reality.
Let’s take a quick example to see how it works.
This is the article from March 2020, the beginning of the pandemic.
Title: Pepe Reina, footballer, on battling coronavirus: “For 25 minutes I ran out of oxygen.”
Although, time has proved, in vast majority of cases athletes don’t struggle with COVID, when the virus first appeared, the media didn’t miss the chance to cover such extreme events and turn them into our reality. They created a narrative based on those extremes. Cherry-picking is a term used when someone focuses only on evidence that supports their narrative while ignoring evidence that contradicts it. To make it simple, let’s just say there was a lot of cherry-picking done by the media. It was a harvesting season like no other.
Fear pervaded our reality, and then the rules were made based on that fear. And yet, those rules were directed by science, the most noble part of the system — something that had been pushing us forward as a society for hundreds of years. So, those who didn’t follow the rules were not only condemned as immoral, but also stupid, reckless, regressive. What are we if we deny everything that makes us part of the system? If we deny science, media and government, three main pillars of the system? We are, as Emmanuel Macron recently called people who have not been vaccinated, not citizens. We are not part of the system.
The result was anarchism — the anti-system made of people with its own values whose morality is drawn from not following the rules made by the system. Actually, everything connected to those rules is immoral. And totalitarian, fascist, dictatorial. That’s why dystopia is not achievable.
Anarchism is simply a byproduct of totalitarianism. They are two parallel processes, and when totalitarianism is on the rise, anarchism is on the rise as well. When rules are perceived as totalitarian, there must be anarchism, or in other words, people who don’t comply.
The new anti-system has built their communication channels. Even though they have been massively censored by the system, they have been managing to voice their messages via alternative media websites, podcasts, some social media and even Facebook in the measure they have been allowed to.
However, many times those messages were off reality as well.
Just as the mainstream media was covering extreme events and thus made our reality extreme, now the alternative media was doing the same thing. Although very rare, when somebody died from vaccination, those media didn’t miss to focus on that and thus turn such events into reality for their audience. Basically, they just picked the leftovers cherries that had not been picked by the mainstream media. They created the counter-narrative, which had similar failures as the mainstream narrative, and more importantly, it was based on the same fear created by the same dysfunctional system focused on wars, money and ad-hoc solutions. That same fear now flows in all directions.
For the first time ever, we have a situation where we are literally forced to take a side. Either we are vaccinated, or we are not vaccinated. There is no third option. That is what makes this situation so polarising and what makes fear so inclusive. In the same time, those who tried to stay outside the argument were pushed into the same bracket as anti-vaxxers. For the mainstream media there was only one right option. Only one moral option. Anybody who tried to say anything against the mainstream narrative was condemned as immoral.
What was moral for one group of people became immoral for another one, and the media was the main force to deepen the division between the two sides.
We can elaborate this on the example of protests against COVID measures. I have been covering those protests since March 2021, and the media coverage (if there was any) I saw after protests was always very different to what I witnessed on the field. Tell me, those who have never attended one of those protests, what is the first notion you have of protesters? Is it aggressive maniacs? Far-right extremists? Religious fanatics? Flat-earth worshipers? Something else?
Again, that is how the media works. Yes, protests were attended by far-right, religious, flat-earth fanatics, but the protests were also attended by tens and hundreds of thousands of people who were there simply to express their opinion on the situation. However, the media focused on the extreme minority and completely, delusionally denied all the others who were beyond that extreme bubble. And beyond that bubble there were many people who didn’t want to be identified with extremists. But they were all put into the same category, nonetheless. You remember, there is no third option — you are either vaccinated or not vaccinated. You either follow the rules, or you are a far-right extremist.
Here is where it becomes awkward. The war can hardly happen between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, but once the matter becomes about far-right and whatever is on the other side, that is where the war environment starts igniting. That is where politicians take over. As the story is advancing, the identifications are expanding, protesters are becoming Trumpists and those who are opposing them are becoming Bidenists. Or something else, depending on the country.
Recently we can see the mainstream media has started to change the COVID narrative, and as the narrative changes the identification with any of the two sides are becoming less and less about COVID, and it is becoming more and more political, sociological, and especially economical. However, the main and the most dangerous identification is the one that Macron acknowledged recently — identification with citizens or not citizens, with the system or anti-system. That is where the moral values are drawn from. The question is what happens next. Those people who have become against the system lost trust in the main pillars of society — government, media and science. Whatever comes after this virus, there will be people who draw morality from not following rules.
The division grows…