Rage

In the context of this rant, ‘Rage’ refers to the relatively recent South African tradition whereby teenagers who have finished high school, go on a binge to let off steam after their final exams. Rage events are normally hosted in coastal hotspots just prior to the kick-off of the Christmas holiday season. Booze, smooching, dancing, sweating and coupling are de rigueur. Its nearest equivalent in the US would be Spring Break. In most years, I have absolutely no objection to the principle of Rage - high school can be a rough time for adolescent human beings and they should be afforded the time and space to decompress.  

This, however, is NOT most years. For a moment, let us put aside the weapons-grade morons who think Covid 19 is caused by 5G or vaccine profiteers and acknowledge that the virus is an unprecedented human health risk. Anyone with a quarter of a neuron would have assumed that Rage events needed to be banned by the government as the number of South African Covid cases skyrocketed and research about ‘super spreader’ events became clear. Relying on the South African government for anything other than a litany of jaw-dropping scandals, cover ups and lies would be ridiculous however. But everyone knows this. I thought it obvious, therefore, that any person with sufficient cerebral function to eat without assistance, would have understood that Rage needed to be cancelled this year. 

Alas. 

While our state schools were still writing their final exams, a number of private school kids jetted off for Rage. These are the most privileged students in the country, supposedly just imbued with the country’s premier education. They are the offspring of the richest South Africans. Their connections and privilege will give them access to work and further educational opportunities that most young South Africans don’t even know exist. The future captains of industry. 

Well, there’s a dearth of leadership in the world right now and clearly it ain’t about to improve. It is almost beyond comprehension that this bunch of supposedly uber-educated imbeciles thought it just dandy to attend Rage. It is even more gobsmacking that their parents okayed and then funded their little darlings’ super-spreader extravaganzas.  

The organisers of the Rage events made platitudes about social distancing and following regulations blah blah blah. The naivete (or stupidity) in this is staggering. Were they never 18 themselves? Have they ever met an 18-year-old loosed on the world with full freedom and cash to burn? EVERYTHING those kids went to Rage for, specifically precluded social distancing and specifically included the exchange of all manner of bodily fluids. While the dance floors heaved with sweaty bodies, every flowerbed, alley, dune, car seat and public convenience was no doubt occupied by Ragers intent on becoming, at the very least, intimately familiar with the internal workings of one another’s faces. 

This is normal - it is part of being 18 in many parts of the world… but it is sociopathic madness in 2020. Some estimates have put the infection rate of these Ragers at 90%.

So it was that these future leaders left Rage carrying a special, early Chritsmas gift. They went home to bequeath their gifts of Covid RNA to their families and communities just about to gather for the holidays. To their parents, their siblings, their aging grandparents, shop keepers, petrol attendants, domestic workers - and any number of others who, if they become symptomatic, will not have access to anything other than the crime-against-humanity that passes for government health services in South Africa. 

My77-year-old father recently recovered from Covid. He was on oxygen for a week. It is highly likely he would have been hospitalised, but there wasn’t a private hospital bed available in the Eastern Cape and so my mother nursed him to health with the help of saintly GP. We may have been able to find rusty gurney in the corridor of a government facility but the horrors to which my poor dad was subjected by the ANC government’s idea of health earlier in the year precluded this. As I write, the ICUs in the Durban region are full to capacity, mostly with Covid patients. 

Many will not be as fortunate as my father. As our president said chillingly last night, for a lot of people, this will be their last Christmas. Three hundred and ninety heroic South African health workers have died of Covid. The Ragers and their parents have shoved a big, privileged, middle finger in the faces of those heroes and their families. 

And for what exactly? 

Fact & Fabrication

It's extremely hard to know what to believe these days. As Tom Eaton wrote recently, we live in a world where ‘fake news makes us doubt all facts and then makes us doubt whether facts even exist.’ This is how the post truth world works.

Jackie says to John, ‘it’s hot today.’

John shouts: ‘No it isn’t!’

Jackie says, ‘I think it is, I feel really hot.’ 

John shouts: ‘It’s not hot today!’

Jackie says: ‘But here is a swiss calibrated thermometer with an internet connection to 35 weather stations for this area. It says it’s 45 degrees celsius - that’s pretty hot.’’

John shouts: ‘It’s not hot today, that’s communist propaganda!’

Any crackpot with an idea, a conspiracy in his heart and wifi can create a website (or pay someone to do it) and then pontificate. Because what they say is on a website, twitter, their blog or YouTube channel, there are vast hordes of ignorami prepared to believe what they say. Until very recently, social media groups refused to censor anything their users said. Crackpottery is entirely allowed and indeed encouraged.

The Flat Earth Society is a good example. Staggeringly, there is a fairly large group of people in the world who think the world is flat…not people living on a hitherto undiscovered island in the Pacific - but people with first world internet and what passes for schooling. In fact there are any number of competing flat earth groups. 

Notwithstanding the fact that humanity has produced a goodly number of idiots over the last 300 000 years, let’s examine the phenomenon. 

There are certain things that we assume to be known - we do this by default. Not every human being needs to relearn the collective knowledge of all human beings for the last 300 000 years. What’s more, we live in a data-filled world where we can only learn a tiny fraction of the total human knowledge. UG the caveman on the other hand, had to know absolutely everything about his environment. To make fire, hunt food, chop off a gangrenous toe, navigate his blighted bit of forest, grow food, club neighbours to death, make babies, administer herbal remedies and sacrifice rabbits to his deity. 

This is not the case any more - we must assume certain knowledge in order to function as a society of specialists. For example, although most of us don’t have the foggiest understanding of the sorcery that is the internal combustion engine, our lack of knowledge does not preclude our driving a car. You don’t have to be a mechanic to be a driver. 

We assume many of the things we are told are true as children - we have no other way of learning and no mechanism of testing what we are told until we’re older - often with painful results. ‘Don’t play with matches James, you’ll burn yourself.’ Most kids believe their parents. Some, like me, spend an afternoon with a blackened finger in a bag of ice before they understand that fire is hot. As we get older we learn to be a little more skeptical - we learn that people may, in fact, tell us pork pies from time to time but there is still not enough time in the day to question absolutely everything. We do not need to be shot in order to test the assumption that guns can kill - we accept the third hand evidence of others. We do not need to suffer amoebic dysentery to accept that washing our hands after taking a dump is a good idea. A healthy dose of skepticism is good. Hyper Skepticism is downright dangerous. 

The result of all this I found one day, was deeply disturbing. Someone took me aside and told me that the world is not round. It is actually a flat plate surrounded by a wall of ice, accelerating upwards at 9.8 metres per square second and that GPS, space travel and photos of the earth are all part of an elaborate international conspiracy. Despite the number of ridiculous absurdities in this assertion, I realised, to my horror, that I was unable to explain the physics of how we know the earth is round. I know I used to know it but it was filed away with other assumed knowledge like bullets kill and hand washing is good after I’ve been to the loo. 

Aristotle, more than 2000 years ago knew the earth was round. Magellan did not sail his ship into an ice wall. But none of this matters to the believers. In 2016 the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson had a twitter debate with music producer B.o.B - for clarity, the former knows the earth is round the latter thinks we live on an accelerating disk surrounded by an ice wall. The producer with no more than primary school science, thought it entirely within his realm of expertise to debate a man with a string of physics degrees from Harvard, the university of Texas and a PhD from Columbia. I suspect quite strongly that NdT knows a fraction of what B.o.B knows about music production - which is precisely why you won’t find him mouthing off about it on social media. 

This is a great illustration of the problem. A man with absolutely no basis to be discussing physics has a platform on which he can spout utter codswallop and be believed - indeed Twitter went wild with thousands of people agreeing with Mr B.o.B. This is the world we live in - a world where someone with a PhD in astrophysics is assumed (without any evidence) to be part of or conned by an elaborate international conspiracy. When presented with evidence, the doubters do not interrogate it, they simply dismiss it as yet another part of the conspiracy. 

This problem isn’t one of the internet or social media age - but these days, the speed at which information (garbage and truth) can spread is unprecedented. Books full of outrageous claims and wild generalisation can be just as meticulously published and packaged on any range of subjects - politics, so-called science, health, psychology - you name it and some crackpot will have published on it and many will have read and believed it. But a book takes a hell of a lot longer to circulate than Mr B.o.B’s tweets. 

So if you are looking for the truth and not just seeking to seize on any opportunity to confirm your beliefs and dismiss everything else as a conspiracy perpetrated by the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, Queen Elizabeth II and some reptile people, how do you find it? 

Here for better or worse, are my suggestions.

No matter where on the political spectrum you find yourself, you should not be getting your information from a politician. These are a breed of Homo sapiens whose livelihoods depend on your believing what they say. They are not and never have been purveyors of truth for the sake of truth.

Social media is a dreadful place to find actual information. It should be used for stalking old flames, finding new ones, checking up on your spouse, dopamine hits for likes, cat videos and marketing. It is NOT a source of truthful information. It is a place where anybody can say literally anything, no matter how fucking insane. 

Sadly, you will not find truth in your heart - no matter what the fairytales, self-help books and life coaches say. You might find what feels right to you based on your genetics, upbringing, schooling and culture - but these are the very things that make us all biased. 

Take care not to confuse Opinion with News. These are not the same thing, although various media houses are excellent at making us think what they peddle is news when actually it is wild assumption and outright fabrication. News is factual reporting without comment. Opinion is just that - opinion - may be right or wrong but it’s an author’s interpretation. 

Books - it is slightly more difficult to lie consistently and cogently for 120 000 words than it is in 140 characters. Yet books are still a minefield - especially if you buy one for the purposes of learning something you know nothing about. You have no way of interrogating what the author says, what they believe, what sources they’ve ignored, who funded them or how pissed off they were when they wrote it. 

Whatever you read, find out as much about the author as you can before you waste your money and time. Who is funding them? Is their research peer reviewed? Are those peers from an echo chamber? Do they have a political axe to grind? Asking these questions of our sources would go a long way to helping us separate the facts about Covid-19 from the utterly baffling barrage of contradictory, politically polarised, agenda-riddled horse dung we’ve been force fed over the last year. 

On the echo chamber - try to escape. Steer clear of media that simply confirms your beliefs. Accept discomfort, read, listen, and interrogate the opinions of others. Media houses love to create echo chambers because they build a reliable audience. 

You don’t need to be right

This is the most difficult one for me and most people who have strong opinions. Accept that if you are truly a truth seeker, you don’t need to be right. If you can release the ego trap of needing to be correct, then a world of alternative views and points of view can influence your thinking. 

Lastly - don’t be part of the problem. Don’t share unverified, click bait you found trawling the Dark Web after a bottle of vodka. Have the courage not to mouth off an opinion based on nothing but what you feel - no matter how powerfully you feel it. What you feel at any one time is influenced by hundreds of things: what you ate for lunch, the fight you just had with your bae, your upbringing, the news, the screaming child that kept you up all night, your genes, the spliff you just smoked, the triple scotch you had with your prawn cocktail, the heat, the cold, the moron who just ran a red light in front of you. 

Now, I just need to follow my own advice.