Ah, But it Goes Deeper.....

or.... the roots of conflict...

I wrote a piece a short while ago, broadly about my discomfort in performing; I was trying to explain the approach I have to the kind of music that I’ve ended up being capable of producing. Since then, I’ve widened the remit, and been musing a little more on the apparent disjoint between how I see human activity and how others view it. This has led me to a sort of realisation that it may be more fundamentally basic than simply just differing views of how people are entertained. Looking at the politics of the last few years, and in fact, the politics of my lifetime, I’ve come to the conclusion that the general public attitude to the information about the political process, and our elected leaders, occupies the same sort of strata of understanding as does the appreciation of the arts, namely - there are some people who are dedicated to, and immersed in understanding the mechanics - and there are others who respond to the public profiles of the administrators and their opposition in the same way that they respond to entertainers, They may fabricate neo-practical justifications to support their preferences, but in fact, they merely like or dislike the politician in question according to their demeanour - and how they present themselves. How, I should say, they are presented by professional PR advisers. Aligned media outlets, (broadcast, print, and social) field creatively fabricated expositions on Politicians, (…and Entertainers, of course) employing hyperbolic narratives to fabricate mythologies about both those they like (or are paid to promote), and those they do not like. (or are charged with discrediting)

What critical judgement?

I’m suggesting that critical judgement is thin on the ground amongst the general population. In fact I’m sure it probably always has been. Since information became a commodity, it has all but disappeared entirely. I’d suggest that in large part, even the educated have succumbed to what I’d call the rhetoric of society… Subordinated to the overwhelming need to halt the obvious decline of our civilisation in terms of the rapidly approaching complete failure of its fiscal mechanics - the ‘information revolution’ fueled by social media, has given rise to an easily digestible, largely dramatised view of human affairs. Effectively, We have written a script for humanity which is followed and rarely analysed and understood, but which creates frustration and misconception, and lack of appreciation of the big picture. Our media fosters a narrative which is basically, fiction. It applies to the quality of our entertainment, the arts, commerce, politics, international affairs, etc. It purports to understand and describe skills and values as long as they play to the audience, Objectivity has lost its currency, sacrificed on the altar, largely, of economic expediency.. A friend of mine said to me, today - that all publicly disseminated information is performative. I think this is an accurate description of the stuff that floods the media. In the same way that real music as content is hardly ever the primary component (or even A component) of commercially marketed ‘musical’ artistes, then objective intellectual content is not the primary component of syndicated news. It’s all the same thing. A Dance To The Music Of Time (to coin a phrase)

Scapegoats…

Out of this mass of histrionic, simple-minded rhetoric come the unfortunate spectacle of the scapegoats. The death of critical thinking, coupled with the spread of juvenile popular entertainment, and the appearance of Social Media has meant that swathes of people are lumped in with stereotypical bad apples and targeted by people with a public voice in order to further their own agendas. it has all got really ridiculous, and I fear that unless it becomes possible to reinvigorate the dissemination of objective truths, We are headed for catastrophe