Middle Class Terrorists

I was working on some of the blogs I promised, but something happened that deserved priority. I really had to post this one.

A friend had lost her internet service for a few days and I let her use mine, which involved her coming to my house and using my computer.
The nature of our relationship was such that she was quite happy to have me sit next to her while she opened her email account.

I was, quite frankly, stunned – 247 unopened!

She was obviously an indiscriminate surfer; for she rapidly deleted 50 spam mails and 20 newsletters from organizations she really had no interest in.

OK, what of the remaining 177?

5 were legitimate messages from real friends or relatives.
That left 172, and they all came from just two people.

I sat for an hour while she opened each of these in turn. There was a motley collection of funny/amusing images and cartoons, a few FUD (Fear, uncertainty and Doubt) articles, and some chain letters (“read this, then pass on to 10 friends to assure lifetime happiness”), but the rest all held PowerPoint attachments.

As she watched each one in turn, two things struck me:

1. Whether intentional or otherwise, these were an amazing terrorist tactic to clog up the internet. Imagine how many people were receiving these, and then forwarding them to a list of ‘friends’. Try to calculate the terabytes of feel good crap clogging up servers across the world.

2. They all had the same formulaic structure and content. Soporific music, a soothing voice, and seemingly bland (more on this later), comforting middle class messages.

The first you can easily make up your own mind about, but I want to look at the latter in more depth.

When looked at with a slightly more objective, analytical eye, they were immensely dangerous.
I am no conspirator theorist, but I gradually came to the conclusion that only a few had been created by smug would be Gurus, the rest had been specifically designed to sell a horrific set of subliminal messages.

When I asked my friend to step through a couple with me, pausing at each of the pages, clarifying the message and its inherent hypocrisies and dangers, she sometimes agreed, but more often than not her eyes glazed over and her hackles rose. It was not simply that she felt she had to disagree, it was more that she began to feel embattled, that the stable basis of her life was being threatened by me.
I began to realize that the years of hearing these messages had done their job, she was brainwashed.
She could not deny what I was saying, she had no reasoned or logical counter to it, yet everything about her stated “I will not listen”.

I gave up.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I was not seeing the bogeyman under the bed. Some of the messages were just space wasting, ‘yeah I can agree with that’ pap.
The ‘smile at a stranger and make the world a happier place’ – sure, your smile is going to make a man forget that his wife just left him and he was entrenched etc, but what the hell.
The ‘think positive and you will get everything you want’. OK, except I keep positive thinking that a meteor will land in my garden, turn out to be a huge diamond, and make me wealthy beyond belief – but it hasn’t happened yet.

No, it’s only when we get beyond them.

There is a trick that most partisan ‘survey’ specialists know, a way to lead the interviewee into the answer you want.
e.g.
“Do you think it is OK that children in the US are still starving?”, of course not.
“Do you think the government has unlimited funds at its disposal?’, of course not.
”Do you believe that charity begins at home?”, of course.
“Should we be spending billions on foreign aid instead of investing the money at home?’.
Err, no, I suppose not.

That is how these PowerPoint presentations work.
A series of beautiful photographs, soothing music, scrolling messages, each line revealed after you have swallowed the last. Everything carefully designed to switch off your analytical awareness.

And what are these messages?

It is fine to build up personal wealth at the expense of others.
It is OK to suppress the rights of others if they are contrary to our belief system.
We can sit back smugly surrounded by our nice, comfortable material world as long as we pray each night.
Life is precious if it is white, middle class conservative. (I loved the way my friend swallowed this last, despite her being Chinese!).
Non-white people can be beautiful as long as it’s hard to tell they are not white.
It is great to praise Jesus, it’s dumb to follow everything he said if it is contrary to our comfortable existence.
The list just went on and on.

The next time you get one of these, switch off the sound, pause the scrolling, ask yourself “What am I really being asked to accept?”

Ask yourself if you really want to clog up the internet and continue the brainwashing by passing these bloody things on.