Diversity, alternative Political Philosophies and differences in Politics don’t promote or guarantee fairness and balance.
Anyone appointed to a position of influence and authority because of the physical, material or ideological difference they have with others is more likely to prioritise those who they most closely identify with – or for want of a better term, prioritise the interests of ‘those of their own kind’.
The benchmark of any system of government and the political system that facilitates or leads it being truly representative, Fair, Balanced and Just, is what the politician or political decision maker does on behalf of the person they know least about, have least in common with or are least likely to understand.
A system of government cannot and will not work in the best interests of all, if it doesn’t consider and treat fairly, justly and without bias of any kind, even the very people we might consider that we have every reason want excluded in some way or to despise.
If you have read this and immediately think of someone or some group of people that you feel to be undeserving of the same care and consideration that you for yourself would like, you can now use that feeling and emotion to understand how any system of governance and politics will quickly be undone.
Fake news is a term that we have heard an awful lot of. But is it really all ‘fake’? Can we really trust journalists because they appear to be credible or represent a media outlet that appears legitimate from the outside? Are influencers and public personalities credible just because they have a platform with a ridiculous number of ‘likes’ or ‘follows’?
Speakers & ‘Influencers’ who need to invent credibility because their arguments have none:
Like most subjects being knocked around in the forums of public debate today, fake news is just another ridiculous umbrella term that has been coined by someone who wants to dismiss the arguments or facts being given by someone they disagree with, and they felt the need to be able to hide the inadequacy of their own views or ability to engage in a sensible debate by hiding it behind terms that people go along with – because the term sounds credible and they are afraid of what will happen if they don’t.
In this specific sense, throwing around terms like fake news just to dismiss someone else’s point of view is not only lazy; it is pretty much the same resorting to being nasty or calling people names when you are desperate to hide the truth in what they have to say.
Alternative Truths or Perceptions of the same experience or things:
OK, so fake news is a broader church. But that broader church is most often the difference that exists between one person’s truth, and the truth or true perspective on the same situation or topic as observed or experienced by someone else.
It doesn’t matter how persuasive an argument from one side can be. From the perspective of the individual, none of us experiences the same thing in exactly the same way. Indeed, even in an accident where only you are involved, there are always at least two truths: what actually happened, and then there’s how you experienced it yourself – ie your own.
Opinion presented as News:
Finally, there’s news which is actually opinion. And no, opinion is certainly not news in itself. Unless that is you were quite literally reporting something very subjective such as a story about a celebrity making a public statement about which political party they are going to support.
Regrettably, journalism within the mainstream has either become so poor or so corrupted by the wishes and aims of media platform owners, that very few of the so-called professionals that we access through supposedly credible channels every day, either don’t have the self-awareness to discern between what is the news and their own opinion, or they are deliberately pushing their opinions and abusing their position to influence the public in any number of different ways.
Learning to be a Critical Thinker:
Any one or all of the above may be at work within the news sources that you watch, read or listen to. It is therefore very healthy for us all to watch, read and listen with care.
Pick out the facts. Acknowledge and respect the content and presence of the opinion. But above all, do not let the opinion you have heard then influence how you feel about or how you have interpreted the news.
The easiest way to learn critical thinking – if you have not been taught and you don’t have the time to study the skill by reading a book or studying a course – is to follow and where possible read as many different sources on the same topics as you can.
Just by following different journalists and media platforms from right across the spectrum, you can quickly begin to appreciate the common themes – which on a universal basis will probably be the real news – and then begin to see the opinions, biases and yes – the propaganda at work.
Whatever you do, don’t let tribal thinking stop you from watching, reading or listening to media sources that are outside your ‘bubble’ or sit outside the mainstream. This is how echo chambers are created. It’s how we easily fall into group think. It’s how the destructive processes of relying on confirmation bias to legitimise views and perspectives is born.
It would be fair to say that even the most objective of writers will present their stories with a little bias – even if it really is the lightest touch. Simply because we communicate outwardly with the world based upon our past experiences and what information and interpretations of everything we have experienced we have then taken within.
However, once you can break down the structure of a news report, an interview or even a Facebook Post or a Tweet, you will soon realise that all forms of news and information about current affairs can be a much safer place that we are being told or than it would immediately seem.
We live in a world today, where there is an obsession over the historic wrongs of slavery that were inflicted on people who they are not and who they will never know, by people who are not you or I that we have never known.
Yet what these apologetic obsessives don’t even realise is that an even more oppressive form of slavery exists right now in this day and age. It is the system that we live, breathe, work and exist in, where the politicians and the elites are the masters. Where our belief in the value of money and the value of wealth are serving as our extremely repressive chains.
But when the crash or systemic collapse finally hits us, we have the choice of freedom that ancestors of all races and backgrounds who were physically enslaved in an even less enlightened world than today never had.
We can choose to say no more and take back the power we have given to others to use our own weaknesses against us and learn again to value and have values based on all that we already have.
Yes, it does feel a bit like being the voice of doom and gloom as I write and produce videos about all the things that are going on and talk about what we can realistically expect as being likely to happen next.
The point is, that if someone like me can see what is happening and what is likely to happen next, the people we have elected as MPs have absolutely no excuse not to do so too.
In fact, our public representatives should be well ahead of the curve in both their horizon scanning and thinking than most.
Regrettably, they are not.
To be fair, the complexity of the growing problems and how each and every one of them interacts with the others is mind bogglingly scary to say the least.
Yet it is the culture of ‘let’s always take the easy option’ that exists, top to bottom within the British Political System, that has made the difficulties that are only just starting for us, significantly worse.
There are many people in this Country today who cannot afford to feed themselves, home themselves, clothe themselves, transport themselves or function normally in any way on the wages or income they have, without debt or benefits – or what is really a subsidy from the Government and therefore everyone else in some way.
Prices of the foods, goods and services that provide the basic essentials for life are spiralling out of control. Living at the standard we are experiencing even today, will soon become unaffordable for most.
Yet the complexities I mentioned above, all come back to just one thing: That the economic system we have today has been developed to benefit the self-interests of the few. That those driving it have continued to push prices up in the pursuit of ever-growing profits for as long as our stupid politicians have printed money and kept handing it out. When instead good politicians would have faced up to reality and dealt with the problems for wider society that have been caused by that same greedy few.
The Covid Pandemic has caused out of touch politicians and greedy business and financial leaders to overplay their hand.
In fact, the inflationary spiral they have created together is now out of reach of any form of control they possess. Indeed, the only actions our politicians have to address the issues are only serving to make the whole problem worse.
Events, or a coming chronology of them – which will have been caused by so many different profit-driven people with influence behaving in the same way, will combine to make basic food unaffordable where it is available. It will be absent from the supermarket and shop shelves where it would otherwise be not.
Food riots, as the system collapses and the old order makes way for a new one that will work for all will settle the mind of many. Especially the politicians that we have for the time that their waning power remains.
Greed, hoarding and any kind of self-driven prioritisation will have to go out of the window.
That will mean supermarket rationing as we experienced during the early Lockdowns. There will be an immediate need for Government to step in and fix prices along the entire food and essential goods supply chain, so that nobody can use this time of crisis to profit off the backs of us all.
Some of the more economically minded will baulk at the idea of any kind of price fixing, price regulation or price controls, because of its non-capitalist and non-market-friendly nature.
But the reality is that the epoch of easy money and making massive profits by exploiting the many to benefit the already bloated few, is now reaching its end.
A new system will emerge that will be fair to all. But it will not resemble anything that we’ve seen or experienced before.
As we walk the pathway to get there, it will be necessary to ensure that what we still have available – which will plenty for all of us without the influence or intervention of ongoing greed – will be made available fairly to all.
Money as we know it is likely to become only one of many different ways to make payment as change takes place. And it is therefore just as likely that rationing of the essentials that are available will also be necessary for everyone.
The times ahead may prove to be painful. But it’s the future which is possible for everyone once the change has been completed that we should look forward to.
The opportunities for a fair and just way of living, where everyone and everything matters are not just a pipe dream. They really exist and are there for us all.
After the pain, we have much happier times in store.
The most obvious and apparently most simple way to deal with the Cost-of-Living Crisis is just to put the National Living Wage Rate up, as the Tories have planned for the 2022/23 Tax Year that begins in April.
Most low wage earners will jump at the opportunity to earn 50p an hour more, which works out as £20 extra for a 40-Hour Week and £1000 over the course of the year.
The problem that we now face in this respect alone is that prices of everyday items and energy on their own are likely to swallow up that amount from the pockets of many before the changes have even come into effect.
Whilst a Minimum Wage requirement seems like a very logical rule to have, the rather depressing and counterintuitive flip side of the National Living Wage is that it gives big employers a get out of jail free card when it comes to setting a realistic wage level for frontline roles within their business.
Greedy owners, shareholders and managers – often themselves being paid many times more than their frontline staff – are very happy to use the Minimum Wage benchmark because the Government has set the standard. And it works very well for them because there is an assumed belief that Government control is as far as it goes.
Companies are quite literally using the reference point of the National Living Wage as an excuse not to pay more, when in many cases there is no doubt that they could.
The dilemma is that without the Minimum Wage – as was the case until 1999 – businesses will always pay the lowest paid workers the absolute minimum that they can. They would surely return to this way of employing staff in minimum wage levels were to be scrapped.
Just because employers can get away with anchoring wages around the level of the National Living Wage, it doesn’t follow that they actually should.
Many larger businesses could afford to pay staff more right now by reducing their profits. But as so many of these companies are now shareholder-led, there is an expectation that the bottom line and the dividend payouts will always be prioritised above employees instead.
Adam Tugwell 