The electronic yoke

Submitted by Lindsay
Melbourne Australia!

The land had once enfranchised herself from this
impertinent yoke of prelaty,
 under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery
no free and splendid wit can flourish.
- John Milton, 1642

(6/2018) There is no question that the world is now a far more complex affair than ever before. The rise in population has gone hand in hand with the rise in technology, the struggle for power has mirrored the struggle to survive, and the elevation of the ego has grown from a few megalomaniacs to most politicians and now to a large proportion of the population.

International relations have gone from one great nation having sway over much of the remaining lands to a pyramid of competing interests who jockey for renown and power, making diplomacy both vital and often impossible. The science of political tectonics has become a growth industry, the world of presidential showmanship is now a new type of hunger games entertainment.

Such complexities are now so great that all but a very few citizens lose interest in politics, shrugging their shoulders and voting for anyone who shows signs of being a saviour - or even just giving a good imitation of one. They hope that the leaders of the world, both those elected and those not, will have enough nous to get it sufficiently right so that they can sleep easily – some of the time. And the leaders, all of them without exception, like it that way. Who needs curious citizens asking a stream of awkward questions about policies, laws and other things that don’t concern them?

It is those very few who act as guardians of freedom, whose voice will not be silenced and who become rallying points no matter how they are abused and imprisoned. They come from every nation, their humanity on display and their fight against those who enslave minds and bodies is shouted from the rooftops. Those who briefly appear on our screens as heroes but who are soon relegated to oblivion, who we kind of respect and even envy.

The sad fact is that we are all programmed to accept the status quo. It’s so much easier to immerse ourselves in the wonderful world of electronic arts and culture than it is to take a long hard look at the world around us, and for it to fade from reality. To be yoked to Twitter, Facebook, Snap Chat Amazon, Google and all the apps we can find becomes the base for daily life, while we use the Wildly Weird Wizardry of the internet as schoolteacher and priest. And yes, it becomes mesmerising, comfortable and the portal to friendship.

These are the modern circuses, the diversions that we embrace to not only satisfy our need for recognition and companionship, but to blot out the suspicion that we are nothing more than pawns and powerless puppets in this post-modern world. We no longer expect honesty, probity or responsibility in politics and business; we have become so cynical about their promises that we’d just as soon buy a lottery ticket. And, like Pandora’s box, we are left with nothing but hope.

We also fail to recognise the real cost. The dollars and cents we pay are a small part of the reason that companies peddle the addictive dope above; the major reason are the biographies we give them. They’re gold because they are very saleable.

This theft is far more subtle and debilitating than money, for what we lose is not only our long cherished privacy, but the excitement of variety, the joy of discovery, and most important of all, the exercise of our brains. Self-determination, the pleasures of being different, the awe factor, the challenge of the new – all subsumed by the candy of the electronic gods.

It seems good to have so much knowledge at our fingertips, but knowledge is useless if it is only partly true. Words like ‘alternative facts’ are now accepted as part of life, leading to confusion as being the norm – and that is one of the things that has led to the wildly imbalanced world of equality we are now struggling with .

Our biographies are gold also because they can be used to control us. Like the electronic ankle bracelets fitted to some criminals, they are used to guide our lives in narrow and defined paths; To use only one brand, go to one centre, and above all to accept just one set of values as gospel. They become the death of liberty, the annihilation of equality, and the graveyard of fraternity. All that as we are led to accept that the opposite is true.

Nineteen Eighty Four, that most prescient writing of George Orwell’s, did not go far enough. We are being controlled not from without, but from within. We have absorbed the thought police, we self-regulate; we have given up rebellion in place of sheep-like acceptance. You might say, ‘But I haven’t.’ Good. But your neighbor and his children have. The disease is now a pandemic, a mighty genetic transformation of society. We tell ourselves stories for comfort, we reduce our criticism to local issues and pinpricks, and our world becomes a closed box inhabited by others with the same beliefs.

Even art is succumbing. Invention no longer reflects the ills of society, protest songs rail against the loss of the good life.

To be a human is not to be a machine, but a being who must express itself in disobedience, individuality, and quests for the stars. Yet we allow our children to succumb to the mind-reducing plague because we too have forgotten how to think critically. Logic, ethics and discovery have driven us onward since the beginning of time. Are we prepared to succumb to the mindless conformity being thrust at us now?

Our society used to be built on trust. That’s gone, algorithms having taken its place. We are selling our future as humans to an electronic yoke, our society to mindless rulers who see us as modern day serfs drowning in complexity.

Lindsay, Railing against the failing of the light.