Life Beyond “The News”

If one reads the daily newspaper, one gets the impression that all people talk about is government, politics and sports -- rather than the 95% of what is real life now. The major reason for such a prominence in their coverage is that the government agencies send out constant press releases, so the reporters and editors don’t have to do much else but reprint them -- and since they are heavily-unionized, the ideal is to do nothing and get paid as much as possible for it.

Originality and creativity, will just make everybody else look bad -- so has to be suppressed as soon as it is detected. The hierarchy of the status quo, must be reaffirmed -- even if it leads to plagiarism in merely modifying what the original author said.

That is the bureaucracy of government and most large, well-established organizations that wish to entrench themselves as a permanent fixture of society. But other than government, they don’t last permanently -- and sometimes, even governments fall.

Such a revolution is already under way. It is the unrecorded revolution -- of people just running their own lives, by their own rules, by their own values -- and nothing can stop them. They can’t all be forced to wear a certain uniform and subscribe to the same information and communications technologies, the advertisers would like them to.

There will always be the few looking beyond -- to find the original and authentic, and not just “the news” that everyone mindlessly repeats -- and by repeating it, makes it seem true because of that consensus. Ideally, they’d be many gatekeepers checking along the way for validation -- rather than simply taking authority at face value, as was the problem of dysfunctional societies in which everybody merely followed orders and thought they were exonerated because they simply did what they were told.

The modern news industry works on that model -- that people accept what they are told because somebody has the seemingly proper credentials -- even if nothing else seems to add up or ring true with one’s personal experiences. It is enough that the head authority figure says that it is so -- and that takes precedence over one’s actual experiences and common sense.

That was the prevailing trend towards the end of the last century -- which has pretty much run its course at the beginning of this century and the start of an entirely new experience of life, along much more individual and personalized experiences as one’s actual reality (truth).

This is a very important shift -- in the understanding of reality. For many years in the 20th century, there was an increasing reliance on the generalized knowledge as the real -- even to the discredit of one’s actual experiences as the merely anecdotal -- or not credible. Thus people came to pride themselves on this book knowledge in preference to actual experience and empirical learning. One was actually warned not to attempt to learn anything on their own -- which is a real travesty and misunderstanding of the purpose of learning, education and knowledge.