How many times are we accosted on the internet with the
fakery that is #YOLO, the Facebook statuses telling us how grateful we are, and
the Twitter feeds which tell us to be aspirational and ask for ‘peace and
blessinz’? I, for the record, have been on the receiving end of this stream of
fancy codswallop dozens of times, and I haven’t the slightest compliment to
give the spreaders of such wank that is becoming a growing trend. I have a
theory, perhaps one shared by my fellow observers of the habits of the
internet: these people say these things not because they mean anything
whatsoever, as broad generalisations don’t do so anyway; they do so because it
makes them seem intelligent, as if they have a valuable contribution to give to
the world, as if they aspire to be the next Marco Polo or Da Vinci. That is the
definition of a ‘pseud’, ladies and gentlemen, and this title is no longer
solely bestowed upon columnists in broadsheets or crap authors who made it to
print. We are all now partaking in this redistribution of the dregs of worthless
ersatz-intellectualism, and this is our own doing.
In my opinion, after gold, the US dollar and the Chinese yuan
(order may change in the next five years), the fourth most highly-prized commodity
is intelligence. It is the new currency in an ever-unstable and fast-changing
world. If you are intelligent, you will be able to do number-crunching in a
powerful bank, you will be able to publish a book that sells well and makes a
valid point; your voice will be heard and it will influence others in more ways
than one. But here lies the problem. We all believe ourselves to be
intelligent, that every single human being has a talent. The currency of intelligence
is being infiltrated with a deluge of counterfeit coins; homemade, bad quality
and worth nothing when analysing its actual value. We are doing what the Nazis
failed to achieve against the pound sterling; to counterfeit so much money so
that the value of a currency depreciates so much that the actual coins, made of
the actual copper and nickel, is less evident and depreciates regardless. And now,
as a society, in a zombie-like fashion of unconscious destruction, we are doing
the same to intelligence, so that the difference between inflated and actual
intelligence becomes, at face value, very small. This is dangerous, in case you
needed confirming.
I say that the cause of such a trend is due to humanity’s
want for information. The gathering for information, the traditional way of calculating
someone’s intelligence, is now easier than ever, thanks to the internet. But
our need for information has spurred the rise of a misinformation that seems so
indistinguishable from the real facts that it is being hoarded in a way that
damages necessary judgement. And this misinformation is being spread through word
of mouth and the wish of the majority to show it off to one another, to dazzle
them into sheer shock and oblivion, is becoming ever clearer.
In this process, we have lost the ability to say ‘I don’t
know’. That seems the true saying of someone with intelligence, as that phrase,
albeit in the right context and in the right manner, seems to assert their want
to know, from a wiser person. When did you last hear the phrase ‘I don’t know’
in a lecture, in a book club or other ‘pseud gathering’? In an age where we
take gladly the opportunity to make our voices heard by those who are,
inevitably, not as knowledgeable as those in higher places, the aforementioned
phrase is seen to be a ‘faux pas’. The only people committing the ‘faux pas’
are those who limit the phrase’s usage where most people are not expected to
know vast amounts of knowledge of a niche
interest. This does not mean that the person who doesn’t know about Julius
Caesar is, in fact, a genius or a guru, but that the repression of knowledge of
what was previously the unknown is just plain stupid.
Yes, I am angry and concerned about this. Thanks to Twitter,
we are all allowed to express our views, without the ‘hindrances’ of editors
and a slightly hostile audience that you would find with newspapers. Perhaps it’s
better in the long-run that we don’t pay for Twitter, whilst we pay for
newspapers and books. If you’re going to print something on paper, it may as
well be worth it.
No comments:
Post a Comment