I’m heartened to be reminded, once again, that contrary to pop-psychology, we don’t use only 10% of our brainpower after all. Not so great for the recent film release, Lucy, which apparently uses this non-fact as the premise for most of its plot, but good for the rest of us, who’ve probably been feeling guilty about all that wasted brain space for years (the vague way you do about all those short cuts you know you could be using on your Mac but just can’t be bothered getting around to learning.)
Also wrong: ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand. (How would they breathe?) America was not discovered by Christopher Columbus. Eating carrots does not make you see better in the dark. Marie Antoinette never declared: “Let them eat cake.” You cannot see the Great Wall of China from the Moon. Lightning, strangely enough, quite often does strike the same place twice.
Repeat something often enough and it just becomes one of those facts that everyone knows is true. (…But then actually isn’t.)
In the fast moving world of social media, ‘repeat it enough times and it becomes true’ is even more of a trip-wire. After the Malaysian Airlines crash in the Ukraine, it was reported globally that as many as 100 of the world’s top AIDS specialists had been on board the flight – about a third of the passengers. It was a shocking number of people… and also completely wrong.
The embarrassing error probably wouldn’t have happened ten years ago. Even in the midst of a tragedy, someone would’ve checked. But social media is about being first and about being most: be quick, be everywhere. There’s not much room for thoughtful reflection on current events. You’re yesterdays tweet before you’ve crafted your first 15 characters. And if you dabble in nuance or subtlety – forget it. We want black and white impact.
It’s no surprise that we’ve taken to swiping, scrolling and flicking the way we have. In real life, psychologists reckon we’ve formed a significant impression about a person within 1/10th of a second of seeing their face – and it doesn’t change a great deal given longer exposure time. Slightly more conscious judgements are made about people within the first 7 seconds of meeting them: body language, facial features, tone of voice, aftershave: all bundled up and dismissed or embraced before we’ve even stuttered out our names (although names too we quickly register as LIKE or DISLIKE at some primal level probably related to the kid who flicked boogers at us in Year 2.)
We’re pre-dispositioned to make snap judgements and the media seems to feel they work perfectly for a 24 hour news cycle. Everywhere else, they pretty much suck. Who wants to be summed up so quickly, so neatly? Aren’t we all just a little more complex than that?
Think how easy it is to form an opinion about someone else’s parenting style or personality on the basis of a few quick encounters in the playground, or of someone’s intelligence and worth based on a single conversation or argument. Done.
The label of ‘most hated parents in Australia’ had been slapped on the parents of Thai baby Gammy before anyone knew anything but the barest allegations. No one really cared to consider the complexities of such a scenario, the possibilities of human behaviour under pressure. The hammer simply fell. I found the lightning fast hypocrisy around this case a bit staggering. More than 95% of Down Syndrome diagnoses made in Australia are aborted – secretly, quietly aborted. Those who carry Down syndrome children to full term pregnancy are brave, determined people, often judged by those around them for their decision to bring a child with a disability into the world. That this couple, before anyone knew anything about their case, were eviscerated by what seemed to be the entire Australian population for allegedly suggesting they might have aborted their child seemed pretty harsh given 95% of people make exactly the same decision – just mostly in secret. While later revelations about David Farnell have made this situation even more tragic, it was the speed of the judgement, the depth of the hatred and the complete unwillingness to allow even the possibility of a deeper human story where grace might be extended that was really troubling.
On the political front, the media lives for “Gotcha” moments: those fist pumping occasions when a pollie utters a few words that reveal their ineptitude, the sly motive they’ve been trying to conceal up a sleeve or their evil duplicity. We’re encouraged to SHARE and LIKE sound bites that confirm what we already believe to be true about people. And like good little consumers, we dutifully pass on the nuggets: gleeful, outraged or indignantly righteous.
And the outcome? A hail storm of opinion and counter opinion, neatly packaged in bite sized pieces that we can assess at a glance, parrot or “poohoo”, and then move on. Fast. So here we all are, committed to what we know we believe, hunkered down in our own little ideological bunkers.
I wonder what would happen if we all just… slowed…down? Committed ourselves to looking a bit longer, thinking a bit deeper, reacting a bit more slowly? And graciously?
There are two sides to every story. No one is one-dimensional. Every person has their shadow side as well as their light. And if we all committed ourselves to being more open-minded, slower to judge, less simplistic in our labels of left and right and black and white and in and out… maybe we’d find people around us more open to conversation.
Maybe we’d find ourselves being fed fewer three-word slogans because we’d demonstrated we could handle more. Maybe we’d show ourselves to be the kind of people who have the capacity to realise that no ideology is perfect, that life is difficult. That grace is possible. That we’re capable of deep thought and genuine compassion. Isn’t that how we hope others will treat us? Maybe we’d free up our leaders to be the same. And maybe we’d find a way to listen to one another instead of just shouting the same, tired old phrases in each other’s direction.
Then again, maybe we’re happy using only 10% of our brain power after all.
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