When I picked up the latest Echo from my driveway, today, I clipped out, for the first time ever, an article. It was titled ‘Like a bird, on a wire’ and it was written by David Heilpern, former magistrate. I clipped it because ever since I heard tonight’s subject, ‘life’, I have been really, really suffering. And yes, it does have to do with ‘that’ election, but only tangentially.
Allow me a moment to clarify. Ever since Covid, I’ve found myself in opposition to… others. Covid morphed into Trump, along with a big dose of climate melancholia. But here’s the thing. I discovered, for the first time in my life, that people have simply stopped listening to anything they don’t completely agree with. And the list keeps growing, and including even people I never would have thought would be in that group.
I’m not going to talk about whether any of them are right or wrong, on vaccines, on climate change, on Trump… that’s not the issue.
The issue is what has happened to cause this unheard-of division and dichotomy that is even reaching into families and breaking them apart? It’s not enough for me to say I’m right and they’re wrong. Hey, enough people in America believe they are right to elect… you know who!
So… what has changed? What could possibly have such a major effect and yet to be almost undetectable to us? And if I am unwilling to say I’m right and they’re wrong, what part of the problem and what part of the solution does this little life, christened Ian Blair Hamilton, have?
During Covid I made a lot of people angry on social media. The most common argument was that the science of the vax was a ‘done deal’ and just because I don’t understand how to read a scientific review, I can be dismissed as someone too, well, stupid to spend time on. Since that time I’ve thought a great deal about this. Science occupied an almost sacred credibility… but what those same pro-science people didn’t understand was the psychology of communication. I think we’ve probably all experienced some situation where we KNOW we are right, but can’t, no matter how eloquent we are, be heard. It demonstrated to me that science, although rigorous, still needs to be heard, and that hearing is still the preserve of the individual.
David’s article was a brilliant description of his deep and ongoing frustration at just how hard it is to change minds. After 14 drug inquiries, and as he puts it, his 300th inquiry into old-growth forests, he is venting his frustration. He is doubting if anything he ever said changed anything.
Here’s the only theory I have. Name me one thing so fully taken up, so fully penetrated, so fully replacing our old ways… And maybe, just maybe that has something to do with this inability to hear anyone anymore. I am of course talking about that incomprehensibly large behemoth called the internet. I hear people tell me: ‘Oh, we’ve been through phases like this before’. Please, I ask, tell me when we have been inundated daily with thousands of messages with one purpose: profit?.
Now, we are on the precipice-like edge of a whole acceleration of that, called AI, artificial intelligence. If you don’t understand what effect it is already having… I suggest you find out.
Here’s my bottom line. My ‘life’ was a summation of my thoughts coming to me as a result of my life experiences. I am ‘this’ because ‘that’ happened to me. I believe that the designers of the intelligence that now pervades our mental bandwidth are paid to take over that bandwidth that I once called ‘Ian’. I come to that conclusion as a participant victim, not as an observer, for my first defence, that other people are wrong.
That idea no longer holds water. They just think as strongly and defensively as I do. How can I say that’s ‘wrong’?
David, I hear you. Near the end of his article he is asked for advice on life. He suggests that vulnerability allows the boundaries of one’s tight and perhaps crustaceous self to be frayed and maybe even changed. I get it. To be vulnerable I have to be willing to hear, really hear that person opposite me who may be diametrically opposed to how I think.
Right there, in that moment is the potential of true change.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
