Consequential Confusion

I admire people who do street outreach. It's a hard job. People have become just as desensitized to fundraising and awareness campaigns as they have to the issues themselves. As a result these people spend hours on the street, often with little reward for their efforts.

Even for those of us who have been involved in similar campaigns, stopping to chat seems more a courtesy than a productive discourse. With all the advertising we've been exposed to, we've been trained to recognize scripted/packaged messages and immediately zone out when we sense them. We smile, nod, take the pamphlet, and walk away. It's almost like we don't even care.

But that's not true, is it? We care. We are human. We are empathetic. So why do I cross the street when I see a clipboard?

Maybe it's because we already know. Lack of awareness is no longer the primary barrier to behaviour change. We have such ease of access to information that by the time we reach our twentieth year it is almost impossible to be ignorant of inequality, of poverty, of suffering. But it's in the nature of our knowing that we find a problem.

We receive more information on a daily basis than any other generation before us, and that high volume necessitates a high capacity method of processing it. Like any other "streamlined" process, I think the quality of our knowing must suffer. When we learn, we effectively file the information away for use when it is needed. Contemplation is inefficient and as a result is only used as a last resort in the learning process.

More and more we use mass media to disseminate knowledge (For the record, I consider 100 people on the street saying the same thing to be a form of mass media). Information regarding global realities is delivered alongside, and in a nearly identical package to, fashion, fiction and frivolity. To our minds, there is really no difference between watching the news and watching a show. So how can we expect, without the aid of contemplation, to treat one as being more "real" than the other? How do we expect take a statistic, and understand it as a human reality? How do we learn to understand the bottom billion as a billion individual persons, each of whom are happy but hungry, innovative but vulnerable, hopeful but trapped inside an uncaring economy.

Even if we take that step and come to accept this information as a human reality, we are now challenged with connecting it to our own lives and really understanding that causal link. It is already difficult for people to fully understand consequences that occur outside of their sphere of awareness. To make matters even more confusing, we have cultivated a society where the boundary between reality and make-believe is becoming increasingly blurry. Gamers spend hours of their lives in a virtual world. They construct a character. They give it a name, a personality, and invest countless hours into levelling up or developing certain skills. That time investment is real, that effort is real, the people that you interact with are real, but the causal chains initiated in a game remain confined to the virtual world. Likewise we can step on a treadmill and run for an hour, never having gone anywhere. In a world where so much "doing" can be so apparently inconsequential, how could we ever fully realize that a small act such as changing the way you buy your coffee has a real impact on the world, and the people on the other side of it? What could an activist possibly say to connect us to their cause?

Nothing. It's our responsibility to be open. It's our responsibility to listen and to contemplate - flip a switch in our brains and contemplate the reality of what they are saying. If you approach information, new or old, in this way you can expand your sphere of awareness and discover new territory in your sphere of influence. This is the zone where new decisions are made. It's where what you hear affects what you do.

Still, issue by issue, it's hard. In the age of globalization, expanding your sphere of awareness to match your sphere of influence is an arduous task at best, and an impossible one at worst. The internet and other forms of mass media have given us access to information, but cannot supply a real connection or a true internalized understanding. You, yourself, are responsible for forging that understanding. It's a deep, exhausting, and life consuming challenge.

It's actually the real reason why I'm trying to move toward buying local, and buying small. I don't know enough about economics to jump on the "globalization sucks!" bandwagon, but it certainly makes it difficult for people to connect with the consequences of their actions. The more I distance myself from that economy, the better I understand my own impact on the world. Maybe I'm just emotionally lazy, but when I buy a side of beef or a bag of vegetables from a family down the road, I don't have to think about it. I know exactly what's happening and I know what it means to them. We are each responsible for how our actions affect each other. That's understanding and security is worth more to me than every article I've ever read on the web.