To this day, no one can leave the news, and even at bedtime, it is waiting for an opportunity to hijack our attention.
Alain De Botton, a famous British writer of talent, reminds us to think about the impact of news: it confuses "novelty" with "reality" without a trace, and avoids the assumptions in the point of view, which not only does not help to understand the world, but also unconsciously destroys the ability to think independently.
This article is excerpted from Alain De Botton's work The Commotion of Journalism, who starts with the role of journalism in society and tries to make readers realize that journalism is the enemy of introspection; that life may be the exact opposite of what news reporting suggests—that nothing is really novel, surprising, or terrifying.
- About the Author -
Alain de Botton, a Talented British writer, was born in 1969 and graduated from Cambridge University and lives in London. He is the author of the novels "Notes on Love", "Love Romance", "Kissing and Telling", and prose works such as "Embracing the Lost Years", "The Consolation of Philosophy", "The Art of Travel", and "The Anxiety of Identity".
For informational purposes, suspend life
All this seems to be self-taught, like breathing or blinking, which is the simplest and ordinary, unremarkable, and insufficient activity in the world.
It only takes a few moments—usually no more than a night (and often much shorter, if we feel particularly agitated, and may not be able to hold back for ten to fifteen minutes)—that we interrupt the various affairs at hand and start looking up the news. We pause our lives in the hope of receiving another dose of critical information to see what the greatest achievements, disasters, and crimes, or epidemics and emotional disputes, have occurred in the world since our last review.
In the following, I try to amplify this ubiquitous and well-known habit to make it more eccentric and harmful than it currently seems.
Journalism now occupies a position of power
At least equivalent to the place that faith once enjoyed
Journalism is dedicated to showing us all the things that are considered rarest and most important, such as tropical snowfall, the president's illegitimate child, or a conjoined baby. Yet, despite its mission to pursue anomalies, journalism cleverly avoids making itself the target of public criticism and does not want to attract attention to the dominance it has acquired in everyday life. News organizations go to great lengths to report stories of all sorts of remarkable, eye-catching, corrupt, or sensational stories, but headlines like "Half the people go crazy for the news every day" never come out of our sights.
The philosopher Hegel believed that when the press replaced religion as our core source of guidance and test of authority, society entered a stage of modernization. In advanced economies, journalism now occupies a position of power, at least as it once enjoyed. Newscasts follow prayer times with incredible precision: morning prayers become morning news, and evening prayers turn into evening reports.
But journalism pursues not just this quasi-religious timetable, but also a certain deference that was once dedicated to faith when we approach it. In the face of the news, we also look forward to getting enlightenment, hoping to distinguish between good and evil, understand suffering, and understand the various truths of life. Similarly, if we refuse to participate in this ritual, we may also be classified as aliens.
The news knows how to operate its own routines without a trace, so it is difficult to question. The news simply speaks to us in a natural, bland tone, and avoids the assumptions that are rife with ideas. In fact, journalism is not simply reporting on global events, but constantly portraying a whole new world in our minds according to our own priorities – this is of course not pressed by the news.
Thinking is discouraged
But it is sculpting the state of the soul
From an early age, we are taught to emphasize the power of images and words. We were taken to the museum and learned in a serious atmosphere that some artists, although they were already ancient, their paintings could change our minds. Poetry and stories that are celebrated have the potential to change our lives.
Curiously, while news is popping up all the time, the graphics and text in it rarely become the content of educational communication. The world thinks it's more important to figure out Othello's conspiracy than to crack the front page of The New York Times. Understanding Mattis's use of color is more of a topic than combing through the celebrity photo column in the Daily Mail. After passing through Bild or OK! After the baptism of magazines, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Hokkaido Shimbun, Tehran Times or The Sun, no one encourages us to think: Have our views been affected?
In fact, news is not only influencing our perception of reality, but also sculpting the state of our souls (where the soul has nothing to do with the supernatural), yet no one has ever led us to think about this extraordinary ability.
Although modern society must be called education, it ignores the most influential educational tools for modern people. No matter how high the level of education in the classroom, the most powerful and lasting form of education is none other than television and computers.
After all, the time enclosed in the classroom is only about eighteen years of our lives, and the rest of our careers are handed over to the news media, which has influenced us more than any academic institution, and as soon as formal education is over, the news becomes our teacher. This is the strongest force in setting the tone of public life and shaping our impressions of external groups, and news is also the driving force behind political and social realities. As revolutionaries know, if you want to change the concept of a country, you cannot go to an art museum, the Ministry of Education or the apartment of a famous novelist, but you must drive a tank to the nerve center of the country, the news headquarters.
The more negative the better
Why do I wait for the audience to keep searching for news? In fact, the biggest reason is fear. As long as you are insulated from the news for a while, the worries in your heart are habitually accumulating. We know that things are unpredictable and that variables happen all the time. An Airbus A380's fuel line could burst and then flare over into the bay with smoke; some virus from an African bat might cross species barriers and infiltrate the ventilation lanes of a fully manned Japanese commuter train; investors might be brewing a currency run; and a normal-looking father might have just killed a lovely pair of children.
But all around us, it may be the quiet of the years. In the garden, the breeze may be blowing through the branches of the plum tree; on the bookshelves of the living room, dust is quietly falling. However, we know that this stability does not reflect the chaotic and violent fundamentals of existence, so that in less than a moment, distress will always arise in its own way. Because we vaguely perceive the possibility of disaster, when we take out our mobile phones and face the source, waiting for the headlines to jump out of the screen, we feel a throbbing fear in our hearts. It felt like being on a pre-dawn cliff, not knowing whether the sun would still rise from the sky, and presumably our ancient ancestors must have been familiar with similar worries.
However, there is also unspeakable pleasure here. Our lives carry claustrophobic burdens, such as living with ourselves, constantly proving our potential to the world, and laboriously convincing the few people around us to listen to our ideas and needs. And news, despite its negativity, can help us relieve us of this burden, and the more tragic it is, the better.
Reading the news is like sticking a seashell to your ear and drowning out the roar of all mankind. Through heavier and more frightening events, we are able to detach ourselves from trivialities and allow larger propositions to overshadow our worries and doubts, which are focused only on ourselves. A famine, a flooded town, a fugitive serial killer, a downed government, an economist's prediction of a relief population next year — the kind of outside uproar we may need in exchange for peace of mind.
Today's news is: a man made love to his mistress on the Internet until late at night, and then due to fatigue driving, the car overturned off the viaduct and crushed a family of five in the van under the bridge. The protagonist of the other case is a promising college student who mysteriously disappears after a party and is found in the trunk of a small taxi five days later. The third story tells the story of the teacher-student relationship between a female tennis coach and a thirteen-year-old disciple.
These things are bizarre, in contrast, and we can't help but be thankful for our sanity and luck. After looking away from the news, we can't help but feel a new sense of relief about the step-by-step trajectory of life: fortunately, we are determined and have snuffed out unusual desires in time, so we have not yet poisoned our colleagues, or murdered relatives and buried them in our yard.
Provide a reason for self-avoidance
The society in which our ancestors lived did not change much – and any change could be significant or even life-threatening. In this context, we inherit a cognitive deficit in the face of novelty: the reflexive belief that something new must be worthy of attention.
But this is not always the case. If we want to remain sober in an era when news dominates the world, we must see that although the categories of "novelty" and "important" overlap, there are still key differences.
When we feel nervous and want to run away from ourselves, what better, more enjoyable, and more decent way to do it than to throw ourselves into the arms of the news? Journalism provides an ideal and serious reason to let go of many things that may be much more important than news. We willingly abdicated all our responsibilities to listen to big and pressing issues such as Brazil's debt, Australia's new leader, Benin's child mortality rate, deforestation in Siberia and the murder of three people in Cleveland.
In terms of the scale and universality of contemporary journalism, it is not difficult to crush our ability to think independently. In the European control room of an international news agency, we would see nearly five hundred people sitting in huge, dimly lit concrete buildings decorated with screens and bulletin boards connected to all corners of the world via fiber optics. The amount of data flowing into this building every day is more than the total amount generated by the entire human race in the twenty-three hundred years from the death of Socrates to the invention of the telephone. Reports from fiber optics, such as the earthquake in Guatemala, the murder in congo, the profit warning in Helsinki, the explosion in Ankara, cover any topic you can think of, any region: whether it's the elections in Burkina Faso or child mortality in Vietnam, whether it's Canada's agricultural subsidies or Rio Tinto's Africa strategy, whether it's Prada's autumn new or Zurich's Chinese restaurant. Look at the clock, it's mid-afternoon in Khartoum, but La Paz is still in the morning light.
It's like being in the departure hall of a large international airport, leaving one behind all vernacular, deep-rooted, slow-moving affairs and being in a crazy, weightless globalized space-time. We live in this lost and random age, and with the help of new technologies, we are able to escape the implications of our homeland, to abandon the rhythms of nature, and to clearly perceive the existence of millions of our fellow citizens around us in the vast city— equally insane with each other, each carrying inhuman misfortunes, ambitions, and eccentricities.
The pace of news updates never stops. No matter how big yesterday's news was — the landslide, the discovery of the half-naked young woman's corpse, the downfall of the politicians of the past — the next morning, all this chaos will all come back. This institutional forgetfulness of news organizations resembles that of a hospital's emergency hall: every night, the blood stains of that day are wiped away, along with the memories of the deceased.
Sometimes one wonders whether the torrent of reporting will dry up temporarily; whether it is possible for humanity to act prudently on a certain day in a certain year and month through some extraordinary coordination mechanism, so as to keep the world safe. Murderers around the world postpone their plans, reckless swimmers don't go into the water, and promiscuous politicians focus on tidying up their own lawns. But regulators of news never need to be afraid of such a situation. Statistics will assure them that in any twenty-four hours, three thousand people will inadvertently die in road accidents around the world, forty-five people will be murdered across the United States, and four hundred fires will take place in homes across southern Europe, not including novel and unforeseen innovative incidents of maiming, intimidation, theft and explosions.
News providers hate it
Mount the screen on the back of our seat
Introspection is never easy. Because introspection aims to unearth the myriad of difficult truths lurking within us. When we are brewing ideas that are particularly embarrassing but may be important, we are most relentlessly running away from our hearts. At this point, our consciousness fell into the hands of the news.
We should perceive how jealous the news, as an enemy of introspection, is and wants to go against it even more. News providers are eager to install screens on the backs of our seats, embed receivers into our watches, and implant phones into our minds to make sure we're always connected, always aware of what's going on, and never feeling lonely.
However, if we do not have the patience to wait for the arrival of personal thoughts like a midwife, we will not be able to provide anything substantial to others.
To make humanity complete, some of the material needed in it cannot be found in the present. Attitudes, ideologies, emotional patterns, and spiritual philosophies must travel centuries back in time, through library corridors, through forgotten museum cabinets, into moss-covered ruined temples, because the answers may be interspersed with notes from deceased masters on second-hand pages, hidden in sets of rusty medieval armor, or enshrined on altars. In addition to staring at the ever-changing pixels on the screen, we also need to flip through the heavy hardcover books — through its binding and pre-computer fonts, a voice is declaring: The truth that was said yesterday still has a place tomorrow.
News makes us feel like we're in times of unparalleled importance, filled with wars, debt, riots, missing children, post-premiere parties, initial public offerings and rogue missiles. Occasionally, we also need to rise to the imaginary space, away from a special meeting, a special plague, some new mobile phone, a shocking wildfire, and drift a few kilometers away from the mantle. When confronted with the ancient times represented by the vast galaxy, even the most intractable problems will be solved.
Occasionally, we should put the news off and turn our eyes to species that are clumsy in expression: kestrels and snow geese, spider beetles and black-faced leafhoppers, lemurs and children — creatures that have no intention of entering the human plot to balance our concerns and self-focus.
To live a fulfilling life, one must have the ability to perceive when news no longer has an original or important educational function. In these moments, it is time to end the connection with strangers and stop at fantasies, and to leave the affairs of governance, success or failure, creation, or killing to others, knowing that the rest of life is short and that one's own goals have yet to be accomplished.
At a time when the marriage rate continues to decline and the divorce rate is rising, more and more people realize that we are not born to know how to love, and mature love must be learned throughout our lives.
This is not something I made up, it is the true knowledge of the contemporary British thinker Alain De Botton after answering the emotional problems of millions of people.
If you have had a similar experience:
Obviously very much love, but always push the other party away; quarrel and break up, exit and regret; give everything, the other party does not appreciate;
I only met true love after marriage; or love is not long, afraid that I will be lonely until I am old...
Then I have to talk to you, Alain DeBotton, a world-renowned British talent.
Some people call him: the walking encyclopedia of love.
Cambridge talent, Alain De Botton
The favorable family environment, coupled with the innate sharpness and strong insight, gave him an unparalleled philosophical talent.
At the age of 23, he wrote a book on the philosophy of love. Fame.
In 2008, he founded a school with a special name, called "Life School".
Alain De Boton at The School of Life
The purpose of the school is a sentence: the love philosophy, marriage problems, and life choices that are not taught in the school will be made up for you here.
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……
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The "School of Life" offline class, the real three floors outside the three floors
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Don't go around the bend,
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