tijaco

There are some people in this world that I come across when I am researching some or other topic and I just think: how do you sleep at night, knowing what you have done? I don’t think these things about criminals; they tend to have environmental reasons for their crimes. I think about this in terms of lobbyists. In particular, lobbyists for the aged care sector.

Victoria has been going through a second wave of coronavirus recently, and it seems to be affecting aged care homes in particular. With some hints from some press conferences and tweets that the aged care sector was notorious, I decided to look into it. Some of the characters I found have spent large portions of their careers lobbying the government to loosen regulations on private aged care providers. Some of spent years arguing in courts that their facility shouldn’t have to abide by something as simple as providing air-conditioning to their residents.

This isn’t an exciting type of evil. It is the most mundane, most impersonalised, most insidious type of evil. These lobbyists have likely never been in one of these struggling aged care homes. They likely have little to no contact with the nurses that have to carry out their new “flexible work” policies by being called in to work at hours’ notice and having no choice but to accept if they want to pay their bills.

When we think of the evillest people in society, it is easy to imagine that they are shadowy figures plotting in dark rooms. In reality, they are completely out in the open. They walk the city streets. They have conversations whose consequences no one can fathom. They have meetings filled with buzzwords and jargon to make them feel better about the reality of their work. They front up to the media whose questions were staged, and they rattle off their public relations spiels.

Perhaps it is not these people who are truly evil but the system in which they operate. But this robs them of their agency and their consciousness to make a decision.

The actions of these people share parallels with the propaganda model under which they thrive. The media in the West has a façade of balance, and many see journalists, perhaps decreasingly these days, as arbiters of truth. In places like China or Russia, however, the propaganda is far more overt. The news in China reflects the CCP’s party line and everyone knows it. Out in the open, it is far more honest, far more noble.

These lobbyists are murderers and torturers. Much like calling Western media propaganda, it feels a little extreme at first. But removing the layers and reasoning down to its core, this is exactly what they respectively are. The murderers that we see locked up in our prisons are far more blatant, open and noble, at least with themselves, about what they have done. Much like Western media, the lobbyists’ more indirect actions cloud the motives of their actions and can use the excuse of simply “being part of the machine”. This doesn’t stop the fact that they are the cause of the suffering.

When researching these people, it seems as if they are proud of what they are doing. I came across one particular lobbyist whose career read like an alternator between government and business lobbyists. It is difficult to understand how someone could write out their career history like that and think “I am doing a good thing”. They must justify it somehow. Perhaps sleeping on a bed of money gleaned from the suffering elderly is worth it.

Moving on to a slightly lighter tone, I wanted to discuss a bit more the idea of China. I noted how blatant their media is. But it isn’t just blatant. It is evidence-based, reason-based. If their media is all bullshit propaganda just like ours, then props to them because they have convinced me far more than Western media. I would posture that this is more a symptom of who is on the right side of the argument than whose propaganda is more effective, but the difference is stark.

In the Western media, the depiction of China is ridiculously one-sided. There is never even the opportunity to see the Chinese perspective. In the English-speaking Chinese media, of the moderate amount I have consumed, both sides of the argument are offered a place. There is the opportunity for the West to make their logical case. But they fail on each and every occasion. It seems that the Chinese media can afford to have the Western perspective on a panel because they trust that they are correct. Western media doesn’t have the same self-confidence.

A similar concept has come to light in the rise of social media and podcasts. Podcasts have offered an alternative to the quick sound-bite version of the mainstream media. As a consequence, people have flooded these podcast forums. It seems that Western audiences aren’t too stupid to consume any more than soundbites, but instead that they were just never offered any more than that. This has bizarrely manifested itself in a comedian, TV host and MMA commentator offering some of the more enlightening content of our generation.

That isn’t a symptom of a healthy society. A healthy society would have provided similar and more professional content to its consumers at the beginnings of the technologies that allowed it. We’ve had radio and television for decades, and yet only now we are realising that if content creation was made accessible, we could actually educate our population?

Apparently, there used to be intellectual debates on television before it was corporatized. Now, those intellectual debates have seemed to have a comeback with the internet. So long as the content creation remains accessible, we might have a chance to do what we should have done with the other technologies. Now that our society is addicted to far more short-term content, perhaps we will need to keep waiting.