The influence game

Are you a pro-vaxxer or anti-vaxxer? Pro-oil or anti-oil? What’s your stance on Afghanistan or the rise of China? Most urgently what’s your opinion on The Milk Crate Challenge? Fear not. This editorial won’t attempt to change your mind on any of these subjects.

But at the same time we might ask, where do you get your news from? This newspaper? The others? News websites? Blogs? Twitter? Facebook? Your neighbour…. How does this shape your opinions and how confident are you that you are right?

The ability to arrive at an informed opinion on any subject requires a level of basic education and awareness sadly lacking in many citizens. An individual may be able to read but unable to comprehend complex ideas, process new information and fit it into what they might already know about a subject. Additionally with the rise of social media, we are, as a species, increasingly distracted. Memes cannot deliver information on what are the terribly complex subjects of what is increasingly becoming a fraught and confusing 21st Century.

Take the two big issues focusing the “First World” media’s attention at the moment: covid19 and climate change. The amount of information and statistics available on these two subjects is staggering in their breadth and granularity. In almost real time we can learn how many people have died from covid-19 in the state of Oregon for example. We can dig down and see deaths or hospitalisations by gender, age, even by political affiliation.

Detailed reports on the potential effects of climate change over the next 30 years come out seemingly every week. Using a cotton tote bag can save so many tons of plastic each year. Driving an EV saves so many hectares of tropical rainforest.

There is a smorgasbord of data and therein lies one problem. Like real Swedish smorgasbords we graze based on our preferences; we seek out information to confirm our views rather than eat without bias from the platter. And with this avalanche of data, statistics can be manipulated to prove any argument. Take climate change where statistics thrown up by both greenwashing companies and environmentalists alike are particularly unreliable generating hollow terminology “sustainable” “eco-friendly” - or dire hypotheticals. Meanwhile countries, many might think are green, are in fact among the biggest polluters. Germany is the largest consumer of the dirtiest energy known to man, lignite coal - 44% of Europe’s total consumption of 359 million tons. And it has said it will not eliminate its use until 2038 and only after paying compensation of 40B Euros to producers.

Environmentally friendly Canada with its pristine wilderness and recycling hipsters riding EV scooters? It is the fourth largest oil producer in the world, and of the most polluting oil there is...originating from what used to be called tar

sands but were rebranded as oil sands to sound less filthy.

Many in the Western economies blame China for growing pollution when the offshoring of their industries to the country over the past thirty years has simply shifted emissions there. In fact in many areas China is far ahead of its Western counterparts. For example the United States has 1650 EV buses in use or about to be. China already has 421,000. Our perceptions rarely capture reality.

We are surrounded by contradictory information and picking sense from it is almost futile. We have busy lives and don’t have time to research the complexities of vaccine efficacy or whether natural gas really is a cleaner source of energy than heavy fuel oil or how much carbon goes into making a wind turbine. But it does not stop many of us from offering or endorsing splendid opinions to our friends and fellow readers. One Sunday in July Instagram was suspiciously awash with a message calling for “Freedom in Cuba”. It was shared by many in Guyana in between posts about their recent brunches.

These hand me down opinions or ideas can become so virulent, so viral, they become the predominant narrative within a country. The rise of the Tea Party and subsequent Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” could in retrospect have only resulted in its violent denouement - the invasion of the US Congress. The Madness of Brexit was hatched by the

English elite, and its success based on a devious campaign of fake statistics and fear mongering over immigration aimed at the working classes. That these two recent examples of the dangers of an ignorant and gullible electorate happened in so called beacons of democracy is remarkable or maybe not. And let us not blame it all on social media. It is less than 80 years since the ruling class in Germany persuaded enough of their population that Jews were extinguishable and less than sixty since American Southerners were convinced that black people should drink from their own water fountains. The collective hypnotisation of a people is the dream of every politician.

For Guyana the ethnic divide makes fertile ground for conspiracy theories, for anecdotes that ride a certain narrative, news stories that appeal to prejudices, and the manipulation of statistics. Overt and covert government propaganda is ubiquitous. All should be met with rigorous scepticism and a counter attack based on rational thought and the principles that through modern history have eradicated poverty and disease and secured human rights for billions.