Braving a few minutes on Twitter the other day, I came across a tweet from a fellow that read as follows: I don’t live in Canada and would like to know what’s really going on up there. It seemed a pretty fair question. Obviously in the modern world, one doesn’t have to physically live in any country to find out information about what is taking place there. However, as anyone who has been paying attention for the past 6 years has noticed, there is no media coverage that can be trusted to deliver the truth and even more striking, there seems no impetus to do so.

On the one hand the mainstream media (MSM) has stopped believing in delivering unbiased news and has chosen the model of persuading society for their own benefit, as to what to believe. In this pursuit of the protection of society from truths that may be harmful to societies health, it is apparently not so large a step to spreading lies for the same reason. And so we’ve spent the last 6 years reading articles in our countries newspapers, or watching and listening to our mainstream media sources report on only those things that extend their agenda and, not just ignoring inconvenient truths, but outright lying about those truths.

Living in a free and mostly intelligent society, it seems like rather a large misstep to lie about things that can instantly be fact checked to demonstrate the lie, but of course the MSM was prepared for that. They had already set up fact checkers for you that, generally in a mumbled mess of words and omissions, concluded the lies were indeed truths. A powerful mechanism to be sure, certainly not something powerful enough to overcome an intelligent society. Ah but as we know, they were prepared for that too. Their campaign of lies and hate did not just make victims of the people involved in their initial news coverage, but could be just as easily turned on anyone who called out their lies. Now this bait and switch argument technique is nothing new. Its been with us as long as we’ve had disagreements. If you’ve ever been in an argument with your significant other, you’re already familiar with this technique. You have almost certainly employed it yourself. Of course, we are right to hope that this form of petty discourse has no place in journalism, and correct to note that it still doesn’t. It has simply replaced journalism. And so, as we have seen, the initial argument that what is being reported is not the truth, is ignored: as it can not be truthfully answered, and the argument is switched to a new argument which can not be defended: he who questions the guilt assigned by the MSM is in fact a supporter of the guilty party and as such, are just as guilty themselves. The more hate filled and venomous the original lie, the more hate filled and repugnant are anyone who questions it.

Again, you might question how this intelligent society you are living in could stand by and watch while someone asking for only the truth could be so vilified, but that’s the beauty of the MSMs first bait and switch, from reporting truth, to reporting what is best for society. As everyone who now questions them is instantly labelled as a most hateful and repugnant creature, it is quickly agreed, by that very same society, that what is best for all its members is the censoring of these radical fringe elements, spouting this repugnant hate, lest they influence society with their incendiary ideas.

It’s an interesting debate, this debate between the protection of the individual versus the protection of the society. It’s been at the heart of governance since day one. While the striking of a balance between the two is obviously the preferred answer, as we all know it has proven no easy task. And over time, in Canada, the US and a great many other nations the political parties have lined up on either side of the debate, with few parties being able to successfully rise to and remain in prominence by finding a middle ground. In 2 countries in North America we have on one side the Conservative and Republican parties aligning with the idea of individual rights being paramount and on the other side the Liberal and Democratic parties lining up with the idea of overall society being paramount.

It is not hard to see how the policies of these second parties align so perfectly with the current desires of the mainstream media. It is a veritable match made in heaven. Now certainly an entirely different paper could and should be written to examine more closely exactly how it is that these 2 entities found themselves so happily marching in lock step, and a great deal of suspicion would be rightly felt by anyone examining the issue, even from a distance. However as I mention, that is for another essay. For our purposes today, what is important is the effect this has had on our society, which at this point we can no longer call an intelligent society, as it has among many other things, decided that arguments and opinions that are not held by our majority, are dangerous and must not be heard. Interestingly the members that form this new version of our society remain the same as when we started. Namely a collection of mostly intelligent individuals that form an unintelligent society. While it may be important to point out that all members of a society can be taken as having differing levels of intelligence, we are still, for the most part, a collection of intelligent beings. Not all knowing, anyone of us and not all agreeing, most certainly, but non the less. Either way, in our search for true information, we can see the pitfalls of believing in the MSM or the current government, not because their goal is to hide the truth but because truth has nothing to do with their goal. Their goal is the betterment of society.

Our tweeter, with his simple query, still has other options however. Namely, Social Media. As we’ve already mentioned this is no easy task right from the get go, as the MSM and local governments have been hard at work making sure those platforms are similarly governed to remove all differing opinions, as they can only be as hate filled and repugnant as the supposed truth they are trying to discover. So finding large trusted sources, with independent fact checkers, open debate and unbiased journalism is no small undertaking when many of them have been systematically removed. However there are still available an endless amount of various people and outlets to be found in the search for these answers. Unfortunately, a great many of them, and with no great surprise, are simply executing the MSM playbook, wherin truth is not their main objective. In this case their actual objectives range from the MSM and local governments idea of the primacy of society over the individual, to a litany of those individuals personal opinions and personal agendas. The majority of which employ the same dirty tactics of argumentative bait and switch. Resulting in any and seemingly every, concept or idea that is presented, being not only instantly questioned, which is good, but instantly reframed as dangerous and extreme, which is obviously, bad. The argument or opinion is then exposed to the new societal model of being the subject of ridicule for disagreeing with the majority OR, and this is where social media demonstrates it’s biggest distinction, for agreeing with the majority. That is unless you have carefully curated your tweets to be an echo chamber that only return the arguments and opinions that you have yourself. In all cases and repeatedly, the quest for truth is quickly forgotten in the quest for the Win.

Societally speaking, we seem incapable of searching for the right answers: the truths. And we instead quickly degenerate to angry mud slinging and name calling. It, terrifyingly and ironically, is exactly what gives credence to the idea that individuals, when left to there own devices, devolve into the very same selfish, hate spreading monsters, that allowed the governments and MSM to take away our individual freedoms in the first place. However there is an easy path forward by which we can rectify this problem. That is by focusing on nothing but the truth. Things are not True and Untrue. Opinions are not truth. Truth is simple, and while that doesn’t mean it is always easy to find, it does mean that the mechanisms for finding it are not hard: everything that is not the truth must be disregarded until the truth is found. The truth might be uncomfortable. Often it is scary and sometimes knowing it is not the best thing for the betterment of society OR the individual. But it is the only thing that matters. It is the only way to move forward. The lack of it is one of the main reasons we are at the point we are at currently, building false premises upon false premises. Moving further and further away from logic and solutions.

You can probably imagine the responses our truth seeking twitterer received from his simple tweet asking: What is actually going on up there? A sampling includes these responses “a group of white supremacists looking for a moment in the camera”, “Foreign dark money intent on toppling democracy”, “lunatic fringe truckers”, “the government is trying to inoculate everyone for global bragging rights” – This goes on and on from all sides. Not one reply interested in sussing out the truth, just in sharing hate and conspiracy theories. I decided I’d give it a try myself. I felt it was a pretty simple question, and while the truth of anyone’s real motives for anything are obviously not yet able to be discovered by myself, I thought it was fair to comment from my perspective and so I did. I mentioned how this was ostensibly a protest by truckers that felt pushed too far by government mandates, but had become something more, as a great number of people who had for the last few years felt as though they were alone and voiceless, were using the opportunity to connect with each other and be heard. I probably don’t have to mention how much hate I received for this. (“Wake up Sheeple!”) And I cant imagine how a person not already accustomed to our strange new world, would have felt reading his replies. But I feel confident in thinking that, if it was his first day on our planet, it would also very likely be his last.

In conclusion, I am not sure that the experiment of the last few years, perpetrated by our governments in cahoots with the MSM and aided by the very members that constitute our society, was undertaken with any other goal or ambition but the age old desire to produce the best society possible for the lives of all it’s members. I do not believe that but I can not say for sure that every man and woman involved did not sincerely believe that what they were doing was the right thing for us all. I can, I believe, feel justified in saying that it was an abject failure. That it not only created a society hostile to anyone who did not agree with the majority or back down and keep silent, but more importantly it created a society hostile to the truth. At the same time dividing, marginalizing and lowering the objectivity and peaceful nature of the individuals that make up its parts. I say it is time for the next experiment. Let’s make the ultimate sacrifice and save us all. Lets make this time about only one thing. Lets just focus on the Truth.