Spin Doctor #3
Morals without Sinning
Jeff Jarvis: “Mark,” he implored, “tell me how to make a community. We should be able to own communities [ my emphasis ]. Tell me how.” Zuckerberg, a geek of few words, answered: “You can’t.” After an uncomfortable pause, he told this room full of media executives that they were asking the wrong question. “You don’t make communities,” he said. “Communities already exist. They’re already doing what they want to do. The question you should be asking is how you can help them do what they want to do better.” His prescription was to bring communities “elegant organization.”
… Like a group of musicians helps organize the feelings of a crowd and gets them up and moving, thus venting their emotions and feelings, connecting at a level beyond everyday reality. No more guilt tripping and salvation of humankind, and a lot more than providing hard facts to help manage the very serious business of the very ordinary everyday life.
The key message of our audience, the anonymous ‘masses’ who flock to social media, is that they have more needs than the serious stuff of bad news, fear and guilt, cancer prevention and climate change. The latter are pretty much the same song as it is being delivered by every insurance broker: “Repent, ye sinners, repent, and pay a modest monthly fee so I may feed my wife and children.”
It may be the heritage of our religion that we still cannot live without feeling guilty. By a twisted sense of self-esteem, born from the very lack of it, guilt raises man’s self-awareness and thus his self-esteem as somebody who might matter. Without feeling guilty man would see no need to improve his ways. Life as it is does not offer sufficient rewards to keep it up. If man were a bit more daring and actually believed in the concept of sin, he actually might commit it every once in a while, if only to feel a bit more real. As it is, man has to make do with guilt tripping, repenting sins he never thought of committing. Too much of a coward.
This is the dark secret at the core of all schemes designed to improve the world and reality which invariably makes such attempts turn violent, authoritarian and totalitarian. Driven by man’s need to tame the terror of the void at the heart of his existence, man knows neither grace nor mercy. Once he has gained power, he will unleash it against all and everyone as they remind him of himself and of the demons that drive him. All struggle for power is driven by fear as a coward’s real enemy is his timid heart.
A writer / journalist with the ability to tap into the subterranean river of dreams that connects us with the ‘masses’ of our prospective audience, of pop culture and our ancestors, they might reach their readers, touch and move them in ways like we want and yearn to be touched and moved. Moved beyond sound reasoning. We might respond in ways as it has not happened for decades. Those who once had trailed along among the flower power children are now the nouveau establishment of political CRRRCTness. As they never took any risks back then, just tagged along and managed to survive without blemishes, they now are safe and secure, issuing edicts and singing in harmony, as mainstream as their parents and the authorities of the old establishment had been back then.
The street fighting monkeys of the next generation need not be fighters and warriors in any violent sense as violence will only breed new violence. If nothing else, this should be the lesson of the failed Arab Spring revolts. None of the earlier revolts in the seventies have succeeded. Violence breeds the wrong kind of followers. No matter what the agenda may have been in the beginning, the intentions and efforts are being corrupted as their leaders struggle for power. Laughter, joy and irony, however, even sarcasm can be far more effective, and they don’t hurt and drain those who deploy them. Instead they will invigorate and inspire us.
Devoid of negativity, laughter, irony, mocking can defeat hostility. Since they do not feed on negativity, they will not spawn new negativity as it is common with liberal / leftist activities that strive on blaming and guilt tripping. Those who feel good about blaming inhabit a shadow world that has only faint, if any resemblance with the world their prospective readers / audience inhabit. All they look for, acknowledge and regurgitate is evidence of their ready-made assumptions.
The metrics for impact should be what the product / content / story / reporting allows the audience to feel, experience and make happen > inspiring and invigorating to act and partake from a positive impulse and position. Guilt is not a healthy remedy, even less so if only virtual, remote and hypothetical.
