Why Can’t We Focus on the Right Things?
Learning to look at society’s ails from the right altitude and with the right level of focus
I had written this piece before the Ohio train derailment that has been terrifying the nation. The people of East Palestine weigh heavily on my mind. The situation is a chilling example of how government and the mainstream press can let us down. Luckily, social media played a positive role, by highlighting the facts on the ground enough so that it became impossible to ignore. It presents a new layer on this essay that I hope you will consider.
As a child, I was always captivated by the Eye of Sauron, from The Lord of the Rings. While more of a movie invention and not as much a part of the original books, Peter Jackson’s interpretation stuck with me as a powerful artistic choice.
Why did Jackson choose to create this version of Sauron in a visual medium? Could it be linked to some modern-day parallel such as government surveillance? Maybe it was simply a more marketable villain? Regardless of why Jackson chose to portray this version of Sauron, it created a clear opportunity for Frodo to destroy the ring. Since evil was limited in where it could focus its attention, the forces of good were able to manipulate that to their benefit. I thought this choice was actually better than the book interpretation because it was simpler to film, and it taught us a lesson.
What we look at matters
Now, none of us were rooting for Sauron, but if he had simply kept his attention on the most important setting–such as the volcano where his soul could be destroyed–he would have probably won! But, like many villains in fiction, he just couldn’t help himself. The distraction did its job, and Mordor was destroyed. Huzzah.
I think the inverse is also true. The forces of good are limited based on where their gaze falls. We have found ourselves in that situation today. In a world filled with boundless access to knowledge, opinions, opportunities and arguments we are having a hard time focusing on the topics that may lead to our own eventual doom.
In this supposed battle between good and evil, everything can hinge on which side is looking in the right direction at a given moment. Journalism has traditionally served as the path for us to refocus our attention. This small group of contrarians and investigators have the potential to get the collective to turn its gaze onto something new. Something important, hopefully.
Since the end of the Cold War, the American media, in particular, has had a difficult time pointing our gaze in the right direction. Without a clear and obvious geopolitical threat, there are any number of abstract issues that may be most important to address at the time for a well-functioning society. Is it poverty? What about drugs? Could immigration be the biggest problem? What about wealth redistribution? What about education? Everyone has an opinion and we could go on for days. Please, bring on Cold War 2 with China, just so we can focus on something!
When matched with the media's profit incentive, over time, this attention-generating power the press had begun to turn on itself. Whatever generated the most attention was the most worthy of our attention. If it bleeds, it leads. We began to focus our gaze on extreme situations, and then extreme opinions. Before we knew it, we had an incredibly polarized ecosystem. The danger came when it turned out that was much easier (and cheaper) to do than the true goals of journalism. It was expensive to build a press corps that strives to discover what’s most important for our society to fix at a given moment in time.
The only difference determining who will prevail, the forces of good or the forces of evil, is where the Great Eye is pointing. What are we paying attention to? Is it the things that inspire and unite us, or is it the things that divide and anger us? So far, the answer has been the latter. That doesn’t have to be the case.
Modern day mistakes in our gaze
This issue is really about our ability to solve our problems effectively as a society. What we read and watch lends momentum to specific movements, individuals and ideas. I think we are all players in this now, through social media and independent media.
If we can turn enough people’s attention towards what matters most, miraculous things can happen. If we focus on the loudest, most entertaining, or most controversial subjects, we can miss opportunities to make the world around us better.
We have seen this throughout history, mostly driven by inspirational and charismatic figures such as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, etc. These individuals were able to divert our attention. To get us all looking in the same direction at a great injustice that we all knew had to change. When done correctly, journalism is just as capable of turning the tide. You can see that in stories like Watergate, or the number of whistleblowers who have released vital information to the press.
However, bias problems and the ever-present profit incentive lends us towards distraction. We see this example all over the place today.
Are we reading stories about the true causes of trending social and economic issues, or are we reading about the most outrageous effects of those issues?
The goal is to acknowledge these lightning rod topics, while not giving them an outsized presence. By tying these controversial and clickable stories to larger issues, we can move conversations to what matters, which makes collaboration and unity more possible. This isn’t an argument against editorialized media. It is an argument for more effective editorialized media that respects society’s collective intelligence and actually releases content in a way that advances issues. Journalists have the ability to inform us deeply and fairly, empowering us to turn civilization in positive directions. Let’s try a few examples.
Elon Musk rather than literally every billionaire
The subject at hand here is simple wealth inequality. A vast majority of Americans do not like the fact that the middle class has become smaller while billionaires flaunt their status and power on Twitter all day. Makes sense. However, we know that Elon isn’t the first billionaire, and actually, his companies are not nearly as evil as some of the ones we’ve seen throughout history.
But Elon is a lightning rod. Every story about him gets clicks. His fans and his haters make sure of it. But by wasting our energy on one man, we are missing the larger conversation that includes Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch and any number of powerful forces at the center of our society.
How do we allow this to keep happening, and how can we slow it down? How can we harness America’s strengths to bolster the middle class, not the upper class? This is the conversation that the media can help us have, if Elon wasn’t so good for their bottom line.
My favorite, often-ignored sign of wealth inequality is inheritances. Not nearly as sexy a topic as Elon’s latest effort to own the libs, right? Experts indicate that over $68 trillion will transfer from baby boomers to their children through inheritance. This has been happening from time immemorial, compounding our inequality problem. Those who build vast amounts of wealth hand it off to people that didn’t do much to earn it for themselves. Not much of a meritocracy if you ask me.
Trump (or Biden) rather than the failures of the neoliberal regime
This example is one of governance and the failures of the current establishment to more adequately improve quality of life for lower or middle-class people in the west. Based on your viewpoint, there are two lightning rods to consider: Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Whether they are lauded or chastised by whatever media outlet, both are presiding over a set of political staffers, institutions and viewpoints that were last remade in the 80s.
By our attention being focused on the latest forgetful phrase from Biden or outburst from Trump, we ignore the realities that the neoliberal order has put us in. After 40 years, we have offshored jobs, weakened unions, strengthened geopolitical adversaries and created multiple financial meltdowns. And both democrats and republicans share responsibility for perpetuating it. If society wants to change its own trajectory, we must first realize who got us here and how. Let’s have this conversation, rather than culture wars designed to scare us into the ballot box.
[BOOK RECOMMENDATION: The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order]
School shootings, homelessness and Kanye West
Oh boy. Tackling this example is as imposing for me as marching upon the Black Gate. The actionable issue here is mental health, and our society’s inability to help those in need before terrible things happen. It is not the only issue, but that is the one where we have the clearest opportunity to come together.
When a school shooting occurs, one side shouts about guns and the other side deflects, talking instead about a mental health crisis. When a homelessness crisis arises in a city, one side shouts about a need for law and order, while the other side deflects to speak to the need for improved mental health treatment. In both cases, someone is talking about the need for improved mental health services, they just aren’t talking about it at the same time.
This seems to present an opportunity for compromise that would help both issues! In reality, not quite. Many media outlets also talk about the importance of mental health, just not on the same issue. They instead tailor their discussion around the issues that matter most to their readership. Like ships passing in the night, we miss the opportunity to gain ground on important issues.
Kanye West is another isolated example of this. We have seen thousands of stories about his latest anti-semitic rant, but very few about his diagnosed illness or the celebrity culture that creates damaging mental health outcomes for those that our society then puts on pedestals. Which one matters more if we were to zoom ahead 100 years? (HINT: It’s not the one that gets the most clicks.)
Everyone is louder now, including the forces of good
So while the extremes seem to have gotten louder than ever, we are ignoring a different online phenomenon. The forces of good, the wisest and most intrepid in our society, have also gotten louder than ever. The internet has made everyone louder. We have scientists, artists, activists, all doing more thanks to the same inventions that are being wielded by whatever forces of evil you are most concerned about.
We’ve established that the news industry is often bad at discussing the larger issues at play. Unfortunately, it’s also bad at seeing the good-faith actors that need more attention in order to change things for the better. Negativity bias is something that most people will recognize, yet as a collective, we fall for it time and time again.
This is compounded by media-driven momentum. As any news cycle can teach us, stories create stories. Follow-ups, columns, interviews, breakdowns, you name it. The deeper we collectively fall into a story’s grip, the more that story moves and develops. This serves a vital purpose by helping us get to the bottom of whatever it is we are most interested in. It shows how we have a collective yearning for understanding once our gaze is turned onto something.
While there are many issues in today’s world, if we were really this close to the brink, I don’t think we would have so much time to read or listen to sensationalist stories at all. We would be too busy prepping our bunkers for the inevitable catastrophe, or training to stop the nearby militia group’s coup attempt, or homeschooling our kids to save them from the army of child grooming teachers.
So, what about those good stories? Well, we don’t hear from them as much. Based on the current media climate, you would think that the end is nigh, regardless of your political leaning. These problems are invented by humans, and they can be fixed by humans.
We could do a lot more to look in unique directions and highlight the people that need our attention. We could give their stories the development and momentum they need to catalyze more positive outcomes. All of the same tools that enable us to hear more of the most negative voices also allow us to amplify the most positive. For the media, that choice has not been the most profitable.
There is value in creating room for optimism in the world. The thrills of progress and hope create a new audience, one that can be engaged just as much as their easily-angered counterparts. This also applies to social media algorithms, which have partnered with media sources to generate more extreme and negative experiences. What if they pointed us towards more inspiring and unifying stories that could bring us closer to improving our civilization?
It may seem like this whole essay is a treatise on how to fight human nature. That’s exactly what it is! The good news is this: We’ve been fighting our brutal nature since we evolved from primates, so I have hope that we can do it once more. We just have to shine a light on it.