Cats and conspiracies

 What a mess we’re in.

Energy prices out of control, inflation rampant, negative growth that points to imminent recession, a housing crisis, rising inequality…

Oh, and the planet’s climate has put humanity on notice: if we don’t tidy up our act, we’ll end up all burning/drowning/starving ourselves to extinction.

The world’s finest minds are already addressing these issues, but it seems that we’re all being governed by the world’s finest mindless. Many of those in power, in Britain and around the world, are displaying on a daily basis just how unfit for power they are. Blinkered outlooks and restrictive ideologies are responsible for the world sleepwalking into self-created oblivion.

A common view among psychologists is that the world is just far too complex for any of us to fully understand. It’s a view that I can sympathise with: if you look at how human society has developed over the last 500 years, it’s obvious just how much progress we made in the last century, from the steam engine to a moon landing in just over 250 years.

As a kid, I watched Star Trek. The communicators that crew members of The Enterprise carried were amazing to my young brain. Could you imagine if we had such things in real life? Thirty years later, the real-world capabilities of smartphones were way beyond what Gene Roddenberry had imagined for centuries in the future. Smartphones also mean that the amount of information we all process every day is, understandably, overwhelming our brains.

The answer to this accelerated culture, in the minds of those who run our societies, is to simplify the world, leaving out details here and there about how the world works in the 21st Century. The thing is, the people in power are the ones deciding what we should know and understand. In almost all cases, exercising power is inherently corrupting: it takes someone with a very strong moral and intellectual core to resist the temptations of power, especially these days, when it goes hand in hand with wealth accumulation.

Where conspiracy theorists go wrong is that they think secret groups of people are keeping secrets from the populace. The reality is that it’s pretty easy to work out who the people in power are and it’s just as easy to discover information that is inconvenient for the narrative told to us by those in power, thanks to the likes of whistleblowers and investigative journalists.

But if that’s the case, why is it that more people don’t know this information and that the conspiracy nuts seem to spend an inordinate amount of time ‘discovering’ obvious nonsense?

There are lots of reasons, but I’ll pick just one as an example. Cat pictures.

Everyone (apart from dog owners, probably) likes to watch a cute cat or kitten doing something adorable. Aww, look at him. What a gorgeous ball of fluffiness he is. But if you’re looking at cat pictures, you’re not reading about alternatives to our current political, economic and ecological situations.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising people for looking at pictures of cats. The very act of looking at a cute cat is comforting and joyous – and lord knows we all need some of that, with the world as it currently is. It is, if you like a form of catharsis (sorry). But cats are far from the only distraction: over the last 20 years, technology has enabled us to take part in many, many other distracting behaviours, from Twitter to TikTok dance crazes. Since the global economy was destroyed by greedy banks and financial institutions in 2008, the world has been a real slump. At the same time, we’ve seen the rise of social media, giving people what they think is a voice. Unfortunately, those voices merely resonate in echo chambers and don’t contribute to real social change.

We’re no longer citizens: our role in the modern world is of consumers. As the word suggests, we are supplied with information, stimuli, products and services: we consume them. Consumption, however, is passive. We’re spoon-fed. Yes, there are choices within our consumption, but modern commerce now has so many options that we’re overwhelmed all over again. Being a consumer is a 24/365 business, so there’s little time to look for and read exposés of corruption or who is spreading disinformation. Especially if we also have a penchant for cat pictures.

The solution is simple.

Nah, just kidding: it isn’t. It’s an extremely complex problem in a highly complex world, so there are no easy answers. (If anyone says there are easy answers to anything these days, your bullshit detector should be on full alert.)

But a good first step is being aware that there is problem, understanding that there are layers to the world that we don’t know enough about. The next step is to, every now and again, watch or read something (from a recognised source, not some random with a YouTube channel) that is out of your comfort zone, something that introduces you to an aspect of the world that you know little or nothing about. Before you know it, you’re finding out more, heading off on interesting tangents and discovering nuggets of useful information.

This process is also good exercise for your brain, sparking new connections between neurons and, to put it bluntly, making you smarter. Your new knowledge reframes what you know and makes it easier to spot the bullshit emerging from those in power.

And you’ll still love cat pictures.