Trusted Lies

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king; or so they say. Reality is that in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is caught and made blind just like the rest. Why? Because there is something called a "collective lie" where everyone believes it and lives by it in their comfortable little bubble. I believe that we live in such a time here in Bahrain and elsewhere around the world.

Traditional news media have proved to me that they can all go screw themselves as far as I'm concerned. Their lies and manipulated truths have reached such a stinking point. They bombard us day in and day out with falsehoods, unneeded news and lies all in the name of their honorable profession and of course a dose of moneymaking won't harm one bit. What is more surprising though is the amount of people that force these lies into their feeble little brains and drift like a dead log in the great river of global media. The funny thing nowadays is that you can get news in any flavor you would like. You can get it through western prospective and their "oh so wonderful" western values; those values that if we look closely were based on Judeo-Christian values no matter how secular and pretty they look. Next you get the prospective of a smartly dressed technocrat; those that hide behind his superior looks and expensive ties hoping that you would buy his mother for the cut price that he is offering for her. Next you get the views of the Islamic fundamentalists whose sole purpose is to fear everyone and everything under the lie that we are still a great empire and the west still fears us and will actually launch new crusades to kill us all by poisoning our candy and baby diapers for a slow and painful death. These are all just examples of the flavors of news you can get just by flipping a few TV channels, mind you I haven’t even touched upon the newspapers and how some writers will their pens into daggers that cut through a body of a nation.

What surprised me most though was not all of the said above. It is the greatest lie that even I believed. The newest and most fashionable lie that is called social media. How gullible I believed that social media would not lie because it is not organized and regular people participate freely in it to provide a bigger picture of the surrounding events. Very funny indeed. Social media have proved to be even more of a lie than those cheap satellite channels that broadcast from a cave under your desk. It has been hijacked by people who are even worse than those who operate those channels, and do you know why they are worse? Because they are too stingy to operate a channel and instead use rumors and lies and let them loose on the herd of cattle just like a flu virus. What is sad though in the end is that most people do not have their own opinions anymore, and that has reached a dangerous level.  Nowadays we need people telling us what to think, when to think it and what to do after we have thought it.

I am not talking about Bahrain exclusively in this post, but I do talk about the state of humanity as a whole and how lazy it has become as to stop the pursuit of truth in the sake of a cool tasty lie. I had thought that the human race have evolved from the concept of herd mentality and feeling comfortable within the confines of the group, how silly of me. If you don’t believe me, and I hope you don’t believe me because I said so, just ask yourself when was the last time you have personally found out a newsfeed, tweet or broadcast was telling the truth by any means possible. I have a lot more I need to get off of my chest regarding this subject but for the sake of my sanity I will end this post by a little scene from the Gulliver's Travels miniseries (1996) where Gulliver lands at the land of the Houyhnhnm or the intelligent horses. During his stay he has found out that in their culture they did know the concept of lies and actually they were shocked at the thought of uttering things that were false and actually regarded it as "yahoo" which is a word for dirty, filthy, savage or in other words human.