If you're not angry...

I've seen this expression in several contexts, but I'm not sure who originally coined it. "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention." This relates to a feeling I have every day. I look around me and very few people have the same sense of frustration that I do about our economy and politics. True, people sometimes seem concerned, but most of the time people just ignore it - a bit like everyone ignores death. It's easier to ignore than to try to do something about it.

To me, something is terribly wrong. I'm neither an economist or a political scientist, but I can feel that the system is poorly designed. Why isn't the public doing anything?

An example is Glenn Greenwald's article in Salon about the defamation of Wikileaks. At first seems like another article about the government vs. Wikileaks, but after reading it a bit further, you might start to get the same sense as I did. That is, that people should be paying attention to this. That something isn't quite right. Try reading it. Maybe you'll get uneasy too.

I worry that sometimes I tend to bore my friends and family with my rants. I try to tell them about how fractional reserve banking is theft. I try to tell them that political parties do not make a democracy. To talk about global climate change. I try to tell them that something is wrong. But I can see by the glazed expressions that it's just not getting through.

I think others have the same problem as I do. Why is it that we can see and that we're angry, and nobody else is? Is it because of some conspiracy of brainwashing or propaganda? Is it because people are lazy and don't want to pay attention? Or is it just because it's too complex?

"The more abstract the truth you want to teach the more you must seduce the senses to it." - Friedrich Nietzsche.

How do we "seduce the senses" of the public? How do we show them, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that something needs to change?

I don' know. But I do know that something is inherently skewed in the existing system if the public is not angry.

Here are a few suggestions for tools that might do the job:

1. Make an information service that is not "news". Let's call it the "un-news". Malaria is a major cause of death and suffering in the world, but we almost never hear about it. I want an information service that tells me about the ongoing problems in the world, not just those that are newsworthy.
2. Make a social networking service that's about arguments. Make one place where we can discuss a given topic, summarize the arguments about the topic, and come to a consensus on the conclusions. A system that cuts the "false" out of rhetoric and makes it easier to understand what's critical to a given issue. We need a tool that allows us to immediately see when the conventional news media is presenting poor evidence or arguments.
3. We need help. Who? Who did we turn to in the past when things weren't working? Usually, we turned to philosophers. Yes philosophers. Those people tucked away in the dusty corners of the social sciences buildings of our universities. These are the people that are experts in rhetoric, experts in logic, and can pull apart the weak arguments of conventional economists and politicians and perhaps assemble something right out of the pieces.  I'm not saying they are without bias or interest, but I'm sure that if they were given the task of deciding whether a given thing was true or not, that we'd get a clear answer.

Perhaps the biggest impact of Wikileaks and their supporting press will not be the piecemeal impact of each leak, but the overall snowball effect that encourages the public to pay attention (and hopefully get angry). I can't say for sure what needs to change, but I can say that we need to be more strategic about how we get that change to happen.