On October 4th Antonio Guterres, General Secretary of The United Nations, addressed the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. As a part of his address Guterres made these most sobering observations and warnings of challenges facing our world:
“Social media platforms are based on a model that monetizes outrage, anger, and negativity and buys and sells data to influence our behavior.”
“Artificial intelligence is compromising the integrity of information systems, the media, and indeed democracy itself.”
One of the great truths of our times is that when paying any attention at all to the news, one must work harder and harder to have a good day.
While blessings and opportunities are always with us, the sense of a good and robust general welfare is not easily held in our time of “monetized outrage, anger and negativity.” Bad news sells big time and outrageous deeds are certainly the center of our collective consciousness. In that way, such deeds are profitable all the while granting a sick kind of permission for entering a race for the bottom.
I tire of the phrase, “a new low.” I am emotionally exhausted by the reporting of human behaviors which have been said to have reached that new low. From the bombing of civilians by Russia in its war in Ukraine to American, Republican politicians who are taken seriously espousing QAnon beliefs claiming that Democrats drink the blood of children, the influence on our behavior – world wide – is anything but good. Democracy is absolutely in peril when Marjorie Taylor Green is championed while Liz Cheney is voted out of office.
Indeed, when no less a global voice than that of the General Secretary of the United Nations warns the world of the collective danger we are in as a result of negativity and monetized anger, things do not look good as autocracy sells and democracy is valued less and less.
In terms of our world condition as presently described, it is very clear that I cannot change it. I cannot even conceive of a way to go about motivating a systemic change overcoming monetized negativity. Even religion in our time – twisted by twisted souls – to be popular and profitable, has abandoned its core beliefs and found gold in the hills of promoting anger, division, and outrage.
I think that overcoming our monetized angers may very well require a conflagration of such intensity that the collective melt down will not be easily endured.
While I cannot change the world or even divisions created by monetized angers and negativity in the world around me, I can take action to ensure that my soul does not become a victim of this social cancer that is eating away at the fabric of life which covered so many of us and which we worked to weave and strengthen.
The way in which to avoid losing oneself in these times to the THREE D’S of depression, despair, and defeat, is – among other things – to pay close attention to the ancient word of the psalmist, specifically Psalm 4:4. “When you are disturbed, when you are angry, do not sin (give into this disturbed anger). On your bed in quiet times search your heart and be still.”
This heart searching is to remember and renew what is loving, hopeful, good, and enduring. Fall asleep thinking about that instead of all the things that have ticked you off.
The THREE D’S can also be avoided by building up the spirit by thinking on Ephesians 4:26. Namely, “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.”
What this means is to own our angers, not repress them. Instead of any repression of anger, work to resolve that anger so that we do not sleep on it and allow it to be nurtured, to fester, and to overtake us so that we lose perspective on all the things which are hopeful, good, and enduring.
It has been known for a long time that anger turned inward – unresolved – leads to depression, despair, and ultimately defeat. We are in a time when so many who seek control and power over us manipulate our anger by profiting when we do not deal with that anger but instead allow it to burst out in ways which do harm to others and to ourselves.
These same folks seek to profit from our anger by monetizing those hard, unresolved feelings hoping that we will join in their negativity and manufactured outrage.
The result? As General Secretary Guterres warns, this is leading to the destruction of democracy itself. From Turkey to China to Italy to the United States this is happening right before our eyes.
In these times of monetized anger leading to all the various outcomes which are unhappily inevitable, capitulation results in just another lost soul who has confused voicing outrage for the power of praise. Capitulation to the negativity of our times results in just another lost soul confusing acts of self-righteous angry violence with the hard work of unconditional love.
The question Jesus asked (and continues to ask) remains if we succumb to the three D’S. “For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their soul? Or what will they give in return for their soul?” (Matthew 16:26).
The answer to Jesus’ question is of course, “not much.”