Manipulation

Manipulation

Every day, especially in this time of social media and 24 hour news, we are being manipulated.  We may not even know it’s happening, it’s insidious and pervasive.  But it’s there and it’s what makes us watch what we watch, like who we like, buy what we buy and vote for who we vote for.   News articles slanted that hit us right in the “feels”, that magnify our fears and insecurities.  Commercials that tell us how we need to live, what kind of person we should be, what we need to buy in order to be a successful person, a good parent, a competent employee.  We are unable as a society to sit in silence so we are always plugged in to something, the t.v, our phones, our computers etc.  It’s like we have an IV drip of manipulation jammed right into our jugular veins.  We can’t escape it.

And even if, like me, we like to tell ourselves we are immune to all of it, we are not.   I don’t like to watch CNN but my partner does and it is on a LOT.  I try to ignore it and pretend I don’t care.  But it seeps into my subconscious.  And the commercials which are almost exclusively about medications and their side effects saturate me with needless anxiety-causing information.   I am obnoxious to watch television with because the commercials drive me crazy and I don’t hold back on my criticism and ridicule of how they treat us like we are brainless sheep.  I can’t help it.  And that, whether I want to admit it or not, is me being manipulated in a different way.

Now, here we all are, a captive audience.  Because of the pandemic, we are isolated in our homes and we are even more susceptible to the manipulation of the media.  Every single day, every single news program talks about almost nothing but COVID-19.  It’s like there is nothing else going on in the world but the pandemic.  But there is stuff going on.  All the issues that made headlines before all of this started are still there even though we aren’t hearing about it.   But the media doesn’t want us to hear about them anymore because it needs us to be scared.  It needs us to believe that this virus is the only thing.  Why?  Look what happens to us because of everything we are being bombarded with.  We panic and hoard food and toilet paper and sanitizing wipes and Lysol.  Because we are scared we do whatever the media and the government tells us to do.   And they make us believe that we are choosing this of our own free will.  They tell us how great it is that we have all come together in this time of need.  They tell us we are heroes for going to work every day, that we are “front line” workers.  They call this a war. 

But think of this.   Would you willingly stay home from your job for a month, losing pay and causing your family untold stress and anxiety if you didn’t have to?  Would you risk losing your business because you want to protect our health care system or those who are vulnerable?  Would you go to work and expose yourself to this deadly virus if you didn’t need the money to pay your bills?   Would you?  Honestly?   If the government had not shut down everything would you have decided on your own to self-isolate or social distance?   Would you be paranoid about germs if you hadn’t heard it on the news how virulent this is? 

I know what you are thinking.  We aren’t being manipulated, we are being informed.  This is a serious crisis and we need to know what is going on.   I agree.  And I am not for one moment suggesting that this whole thing is not a serious threat, the numbers don’t lie. I can’t conceive of any reason why the government would do all of this to us when it’s clearly causing a great deal of hardship for them as well.  There seems to be nothing in it for them.  But the media benefits from our fear, it’s what drives ratings and sells papers.  We are glued to our devices and hungrily feeding on every single update.  Look at the way it is presented to us.  Not just with facts and information, which is important.  But do we really need to see the hard-luck stories, the gut-wrenching grief of people who have lost a loved one?   Every night there are stories of drive-by celebrations, special things done for people with special needs, feel-good stories about people who are doing something good for the cause, stories of incredible hardships.  They manipulate our emotions constantly. 

I am thinking about the days before the internet and social media.  The days before we were constantly plugged in.  Remember those days?  We watched the news at 6 and 11.  And we read the paper.   A talking head would deliver the days news without emotion, without comment, with an impartial attitude.  Were we less compassionate then?  Less willing to pull together as a community to help in a crisis?   I don’t think so.   I think we might have been more so.  We weren’t saturated with it all day long to the point where we shut down our emotions and became apathetic.   I grew up in Barrie.   We had terrible snowstorms there every winter.   And every time, the community would pull together to help people dig cars out, and help seniors shovel their driveways and sidewalks. We still cared.  We didn’t need to be spoon-fed. 

What I am saying is that we need to be more aware of this manipulation.  We need to stop and think before we jump into action because the media made us feel that we should or we would not be a good person.   Why?  Because eventually we will burn out and stop listening to our own feelings and become apathetic and passive.  We will become the sheep that the powers that be would love us to become so that we will swallow whatever they try to shove down our throats.  And that is the most dangerous thing of all.