Our nation has taken a great fall. Yes, the US has always been imperfect but this moment is new. We had our chance to reject the
hateful, criminal Trump brand. But we did not. We had our chance to say “This is not America” and we blew
it.
It
appears that humans aren’t evolved to live peaceably in a globalized
world. We have to design a system that will allow
for species survival AND individual flourishing. Our planet is imperiled and if we can’t calm down and work together we’re all going down on the same ship.
What’s needed is two distinct paths forward: one to vent our steam and another to address how we’re going to rescue our species from the abyss. Both are important, but we confuse them at our peril! Much as this divide resembles the political one, it’s different in a fundamental way. We all share fury, but it solves no problems. If humans are going to survive the suicide our progenitors set us up for, we HAVE to discuss ideas for survival! We can’t allow that vital work to be poisoned by our rage.
I plead for a clear separation––not of the red and blue worlds––but of righteous anger from creative cooperation! We need to find some way for everyone to rage and spew in a safe way. All of our lives have been upheaved and our natural response is rage and fear. So let’s please address that! We all hurt! I NEED to yell and scream and shout how alarmed and scared I am and blame everyone but myself. But that vitriol should be taken in the proper context: as healing a wound rather than suggesting a future! I truly understand the emotion behind calling for someone’s head. Screaming such a thing not only feels great, it’s actually good for you! It expresses
the emotion that, unexpressed, clouds good thinking. Taken literally it’s a fall into the stone age.
If I were king of
the world (Zuckerberg) I would construct an algorithm to shift any
social media message of vitriol into a separate stream intended for the sole purpose of letting off steam. I’d
love a platform where I could shout obscenities in an arena we all
agree should never be taken literally. Its value is for the steam discharge itself, not the words. Raging out our fury or wailing our grief is actually caring for our wound. It promotes healing of a real hurt. But we have to recognize that that’s a very different thing from working for a better future. Actually if both me and my enemy can support each other’s rage as a healing discharge and take it in the context of restoring mental health prior to thinking, we are suddenly on the same side! Now we’re talkin’!
Humanity is in serious danger of extinction. And we already have the capacity to rescue ourselves! To do so we need real creative ideas; huge, strange ideas. We should be having community discussions all over the world about how to prevent our coming environmental speciecide we seem hell-bent on completing. The critical piece is separation of maintaining good mental hygiene from acting in the world! I scream, you scream, let’s call it innocent medicine. But then let’s put our shoulders to the work ahead!
<•••>
Here’s how I think it could work: We assume two separate platforms with different roles:
One platform, say Build, invites people to discuss ideas for how we will carve a liveable and perhaps even vibrant future out of the chaos that is our world today. Solving those issues is complex and delicate and takes a lot of clear heads and creative imagination to formulate (not an arena politicized national leaders and hotheads are likely to succeed at.) Ideas of all kinds would be accepted and curated, like a global kitchen table, better arguments being advanced by group consensus, lessor ones filtered to the bottom. The effect would be to keep dialog positive, constructive and solution-focused. If anyone gets heated up and starts blaming or insulting they are suddenly sent away from the table by algorithm to another platform:
SPEW!, a platform open to anyone and dedicated to allowing anyone to vent about anything, using any kind of language, just to get out their frustrations in a satisfying way. Here one could scream and cry endlessly. The community assumes that the purpose is to beat one’s chest, scream and wail and yell insults, just like professional wrestling! We all love to gather for a great, dramatic fight, but no one is dim enough to take it seriously. We know it for what it is.
Right now, this is how Trump and the GOP is acting. They just don’t have the right platform. Then we could join them and everybody cut loose! Wouldn’t it be great to get together on SPEW!
with an opponent from the other side and beat each other’s
sensibilities out, insult each other’s moms, and then when we’re exhausted and remember we have hungry kids at home, put on our grown-up pants and go back into Build to work out real solutions!?
This ‘adults only’ platform would be intended to host all such traffic,
providing a kind of open, public “trash bin” for any and all impolite
behavior. Any discourse site anywhere that hopes for civic dialog could
shunt such talk to the platform so that this free and open dialog
would not infect polite civic space. Responsible adults could use it to
cut loose, knowing serious dialog is not possible. For public venues, rather than censoring shouters and haters
outright, they could just be sent outside to SPEW! to settle their differences. What’s not to like?
