We need better first-principles. Free speech is useless without free thought. Without divergent thought, debate and robust discussion, we cannot progress as individuals and as a collective. Free speech without free thought, where untruths replace objective facts, effectively becomes a reinforcement loop for an idiocracy.
My three pages and a morning of stream of consciousness writing. It's very therapeutic writing it down in free hand. I can transfer the thoughts in my head onto Muji Elemental Principal Paper, via a little stick in my hand, that releases coloured ink onto a page when I apply pressure to it, using robotic but never the same cursive movements across a soft finely cut tree. I can also transfer these thoughts onto a little digital supercomputer with stronger intelligence and capabilities than former President Reagan ever had access to at his fingertips. I can type these words into a key and send it all off into the cloud. I am not wedded to any of it. I am just rolling through it. Observing it and maybe sharing what I am seeing with all my senses. Including the mind's eye and pineal gland. The centres of instinct and intuition. Knowing I can also be wrong and learn from that. I am not tethered to my ideas but rather people, and use these ideas to build greater texture to that connection. I am a collection of stories that include you and yours. I can write tomorrow completely differently than today if I choose to.
I'm on my third course of antibiotics in the last 2 weeks for an abscess and infection in my tooth that now needs a route canal. I called the NHS 111 number yesterday and was grateful to see an emergency dentist who told me that I was one of about 50 patients in his day and that because of London's chronic shortage of dentists one has to wait weeks if not months for the actual treatment. 2000 dentists left the NHS last year. NHS dentistry has become “a rotten system” which lets down patients and deters practitioners of dental care, said the British Dental Association (BDA), which represents the UK’s dentists.
According to The Guardian, ''access to NHS dental care is so limited that people in some areas are forced to wait three years for an appointment. The difficulty obtaining treatment is one of the public’s main sources of frustration with the health service, with just one in three people satisfied with dental services.
Brexit, Covid (but more Brexit) and government underfunding of NHS dental services have combined to create a “critical” situation which is likely to get worse before it gets better, the ADG warned. After a quick scan my emergency dentist prescribed one dose of Amoxycillin and one dose of Metronidazole, a very strong drug which if mixed with alcohol will without a doubt require two paramedics to peel you off the bathroom floor and rush you to St Georges Hospital in South London. But that's another story altogether.
Thanks to an attack on the street by a madman who broke my jaw, requiring me to go into emergency surgery to have my face reconstructed with titanium implants, I have been in the 'system' for the better part of the last 2 years. I know how easily they will hand you a pile of pills, but getting the right kind of help is often impossible. The Crown Prosecution Service never took the case to court, and I understand that this was because they had too many cases to prosecute and that they needed to prioritise. The event itself was unpleasant and one could make the case that in the developed world, or first world as they used to say, there would be proper post-event care, perhaps even trauma counselling, support, maybe even justice. As someone who respects the rule of law and order, a construct many of us aligned to in terms of a shared set of values and principles in this our new adopted home, I was disappointed when this attacker walked away Scott free, without any punishment. He was never cautioned or arrested, despite the prosecution having compiled enough evidence to prosecute for the second highest charge after murder.
Grievous bodily harm with intent. I feel let down by the system, and sometimes wish I had reacted with more aggression, fury and a killer instinct. I have since given this a lot of thought. Mostly to learn how to create advantage by keeping a cool head, and how to let my mind act as the command centre to control my breathing and my body when if or should that happen again. All I wanted was a sense of proportionate justice. I was robbed of my right to reply. (Actually, all I wanted was to get home after my cycle ride, shower, and enjoy a chilled Sunday afternoon with Aimee over a beer and a Sunday Roast)
I know the system. And have been in it for a few years now. There’s a lot wrong with it. Some of it is good, like the maxillofacial surgery at Harrow by the surgeons from India who put me to sleep whilst we talked about cricket. Whoah, that memory just flooded me with emotion...
I had to come back to my writing. The thought of that moment when the surgeon and anaesthetists from India were talking to me about South African cricket whilst I was lying flat and ready to go under as they put me to sleep, triggered a lot of raw emotion in me. I had a good cry and still have tears rolling down my face. I guess I’ve processed a lot of the tough stuff, and written about it too, so maybe that helped me put the trauma to bed. But writing about that moment gets me going. Such a beautiful moment of bonding with these complete strangers in a strange and uncomfortable place or moment in one’s life. Being put to sleep. No control. You're being submitted into a state of unconsciousness by someone else. After what had just happened to me, the reason why I was there, this felt super uncomfortable. But within moments of speaking to these chaps and finding common ground through cricket and our home countries’ love of it, I felt comfortable and safe.
I wrote about this in a previous article. In that moment just before I drifted off, maybe one or two Mississippi's max, I was visualising the green and gold of home. At this level, there is a lot of good. Humans who we can connect with. But at the system level, there are some issues. I saw the NHS exactly one year before Covid broke out, March 2019 . It was already overrun then. I knew about the stalled growth and declining business environment, brought on by Brexit and the isolationist policies that meant we would sever trading relations with Europe, and countries such as South Africa, who were forced to choose between Europe and the UK in negotiations around the supply of food and other commodities. The switch in the UK’s product mix and assortment, from Europe and South Africa, which was reached overnight by trains, trucks, ships and planes, would now mean the UK would have to find a new trading relationship for fresh fruits, vegetables, meat and wine. In a frenzied race to the bottom, many decisions were made, including to switch to inferior Amazon style supply chains, and to fly live livestock in from Australia to help ‘manage’ these tensions. The UK simultaneously announced world-beating climate change policies. I don’t know anyone else who flies around live livestock from down under, when Calais, the port that connects the UK with Europe, is 20 mins away from the UK via the tunnel, and a few hours if you choose to travel by ferry. Bat sh%t policies.
The bigger threat to the population is that of the mainstream media’s role in all of this, and their collusion with government to use data and media analytics to create targeted messages with real-time behavioural nudges, using distortions and often untruths and lies. Information is then used to tell stories, replete with credible, ‘expert’-endorsed creative arcs. In these stories, there are dark comic book stories, with villains who seek world domination and heroes like Tony Stark. Computer geniuses with awesome superpowers. They can build computer empires and reassure nations on unproven medical science. Their narratives defy fact-based conventions. We no longer need science and statistically sound testing methodologies to be convinced that an intervention is safe at population level. As long as it serves a few, we can test it on the many. Kids included. Other superheroes are hype artists. A hype artist cheapens the hyped, as right things are then made wrong by exaggeration. Let’s not forget that these ‘super heroes’ are all about the HYPE. And if you understand only a little about behavioural psychology and the madness of crowds you will know that things tend to become irrational very quickly when hype fuels consumer behaviour. Is this reality distortion field good for us? Our democratic discourse is no longer healthy. It is top-down, and can lead to cult behaviours. Ever watch Wild Wild Country? These heroes use top-down messages of fear to shift anything from climate change, electric cars, war, chemically produced food substitutes, vaccines and toilet rolls.
How does free speech help us if we don’t have free thought? If our thoughts and behaviours are predicted, modelled and then nudged or influenced by algorithms and media messaging. We become ‘gamed’. Jordan Peterson calls it ‘mass formation psychology’ . I prefer the less pretentious term of ‘the mesmerised masses’. Mesmerised like fruit flies by sweet smelling media messages. They mainline and get drunk on the nectar of these skewed and distorted narratives and eventually drown. Coddled into thinking what others want them to think. Unable to separate myth from fact, and in so doing, to think for themselves. Propagandists have devised handy labels like conspiracy theorist. When someone expresses a thought or belief or idea that doesn’t fit in with the mainstream narrative, the term becomes useful as it can then be used to dismiss, throttle or choke any divergent, independent or fresh thoughts.
What good is free speech if it is not able to free us? From the direction of travel, our current path? Whether it be war, climate change, pronoun discussions over STEM field education, forced vaccines, chemical food substitutes, poorer economic systems, avoidable inflation, and other conflicts? Free speech is an illusion when it is ‘containerised’ on social media in ways that are manipulated by algorithms and predictive loops intended to serve a Huxleyan or Orwellian agenda.
How have we gone from debating veganism, chemical foods, vaccines, health and mental wellness, to immediately taking sides in a war we know little to nothing about? Without passing the ‘are there any other approaches to fixing this’ stage? Free speech without free thought on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have undone us as a society. We are more disconnected than ever. And this doesn’t seem to allow us the ability for peaceful debate, to agree to disagree and respect the other persons point of view. To find alternatives to war and in so doing eliminate existential threats.
I wonder if the activists, the vegans, economists, the climate protesters, the pronouns brigade, and the virtue signallers all know that a protracted world war could be the ultimate game changer for us all? For the animals, humans, earth, and the environment around it? It also kills hope, faith, love, and trust. War is what we all should be opposing together as a collective. We are all human. We have more in common than we know.
Why is everyone suddenly so mesmerised by the PT Barnum show and his circus? Mesmerised by daily tweets? Are our lives that dull? Have we stopped playing together outside? Instead, each day we ‘Look into the eyes, not around the eyes, and 3-2-1, we’re in’. Why aren’t more of us tuned into the real news? That there is a war? That our existing systems which served so many of us are being torn apart in favour of substantially inferior systems. We are signing up to a war with the very real potential to be bigger and scarier than any other? And that we find ourselves in a place where we don’t know who or what to trust? Surely if we have one thing in common it is the fact that we all want to avoid war? Why then are we not protesting and opposing what is happening in the Ukraine, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Africa, Venezuela, Britain, the US, Singapore, France, et al, in equal measure? Canada had a good go at it. Why are we, in 2022, not resolving these conflicts peacefully?
On Friday, according to the FT in London, President Biden asked the American Congress for $33bn in military, economic and ‘humanitarian’ aid to effectively enter the war in Ukraine. The same article referred to a further contraction in growth for the US economy. ‘’Washington is preparing for a long and intensifying conflict’’ - FT.
By Friday afternoon the UK red top mainstream press had begun priming their audiences for WW3. The Sun’s front pages read May Bank Holiday WW3. This is how the audience is conditioned and mesmerised with the careful word-smithing of daily messages. We the people never had a say. We can no longer get rid of our political leaders. Even if they deceive us, lie to us, and break the law. Accountability and trust have eroded to levels I have never known in my life. And I lived through the end of Apartheid, through violent struggles, and was a part of the truth and reconciliation process. I’ve never been a Twitter user but could get behind it if Elon was in charge. But is he really in charge? He serves a number of roles and stakeholders. They all have their own agendas. From Spaceballs to electric cars, media men, investors, venture capitalists, banks, governments etc; these are all contracted stakeholders in a scheme of extractive, inequitable capitalism, fuelled by hype and over-promise, and dogged with a long standing reputation for not delivering to mostly anyone other than themselves. And what would be the end result of this ‘total domination’ of social media from a US point of view? For starters, the new proposed ‘edit’ feature allows for revisionist narratives to creep in which is handy for those who want to rewrite the past. And possibly create more not less mis- and dis-information.
What good is free speech if we are placed into echo chambers where we are stripped of our ability to access and evaluate the objective facts? Many of our decisions are now more a function of targeted media messages using clever behavioural science and technology. Why do we care more about the court jester and his daily puppet show than we do about real issues such as war, inequality, food scarcity, the wilful destruction of supply chains to be replaced by frightening and inferior new supply chains and inequitable economic systems?
We all have equal rights and responsibilities when it comes to the remaining and declining resources of our planet. We need to ensure we use them wisely. These daily ‘idiocracy’ messages create obvious distractions from what we should be focusing on for our own existential survival. The media broadcast untruths with BS corrupt narratives and hype around businesses that are not actually profitable. These lead to bat s*%t valuations and pyramids serving morally corrupt leaders. Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos), Adam Neumann of WeWork, how many other cult crashes do we know of? Still to come? They’re not real. Manipulated by the Morgan Stanley's, the media, dodgy accounting firms and credit agencies that belong to the the ultimate playbook writers, the media men. We need to focus on new metrics.
Free speech is not the end state, or ideal. Free thought is. We should be aiming for a better way. Free thought is a higher ideal than free speech, especially the free speech that was baked in an idiocracy. We need better first principles. A kind, compassionate, moral, humble, servant-style leadership.
‘’The hype cheapens the hyped, as right things are then made wrong by exaggeration. ‘’
Written by: Andrew Soteriou, Strategic Advisor/ Founder/ Entrepreneur/ Investor. Powering Impact & Innovation At Scale | Growth Cultures, Advanced Analytics, Human-Centred Design, fmr Global Price & Strategic Revenue Growth Director at UpClear (New York & London) and CMO at Strategy & Consumer Tech Scaleups, Host of FlowLabs 🎧 podcast.
Speaker: US Consumer Goods And Technology forums, webinars and keynotes events delivered in London & New York, speaker at the Price Optimisation Institute (Geneva and Budapest), and panel member and keynote speaker at the AI/ Big Data and Smart Cities Expo (Amsterdam)
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