PALESTINIAN BRAINHACKING

The human capacity for absorbing information is limited. So we ignore everything else and focus on the thing with the Jews.

Which is it — “Ceasefire now” or total war “From the river to the sea”? 

Depression and anxiety skyrocketed in the previous decade. Statistics from the United States suggest that these problems — which had remained fairly stable in the first decade of the century — rose by more than 50 percent between 2010 to 2019. This is especially true among young people. Terrifyingly, the suicide rate among adolescents aged 10 to 19 rose 48%. For girls aged 10 to 14, suicide rates rose 131%. These are horrifying numbers that should cause all of us to drop everything and address the causes. Somehow, we haven’t.

Part of the reason we may not be addressing the problem is because of the cause. It seems, according to studies, academics and common sense, to centre around smartphones. And since parents are just as addicted as kids, it’s a bit hypocritical to make rules for the littles that you won’t follow yourself. Besides, what an awesome little babysitter that thing is.

There are no doubt a range of factors why mental and emotional challenges seem to be at epidemic proportions — explaining to kids that the world is filled with invisible things called viruses that you can’t see but that can kill you and everyone you love might be one factor. But few people doubt that a major factor is devices. These alarming statistics coincide with the advent of smartphones, which have kept kids (and adults) connected to the internet, with all its wonders and revulsions, 24/7.

The ubiquity of devices and constant connection is not only causing young people (and us older ones too) to get less physical exercise and to go down some dark paths of online adventures. They are literally rewiring our brains. For young people, in addition to a constant comparison with the online perfection of others’ lives, smartphones can bring bullying, extortion, revenge porn and gawdknowswhatelse. At the same time, kids’ brains are being trained to respond to stimuli like pings and likes.

This coincides with (but it’s not coincidental to) foreign interference in politics. We’re still not able to measure precisely what impact Russian bots had on electing Donald Trump in 2016.

Today, when I go on Facebook, my feed is filled with images of dead Palestinian children and Palestinian towns turned to rubble. These images sometimes are every 10th or 20th thing in my feed, fed, apparently, by paid placements. If they are not pictures of dead babies, they are antisemitic cartoons of the Der Sturmer variety. Just as we could not measure the impact of constant drips of misinformation and disinformation in tipping the 2016 U.S. election, we can’t possibly determine the impacts of these barrages of decontextualized images on Canadian, American or other opinions about what is happening in Israel and Palestine right now.

Meanwhile, we have plenty of things to worry about. Foreign powers are hacking our government and corporate systems. In Canada, news of foreign interference in government and politics threatens to blow open, possibly inculcating elected officials and parties. News from every part of the world brings catastrophe and heightens our anxiety.

All of this has created a sort of perfect storm for “pro-Palestinian” activists. It is both cause and effect of what we are seeing on campuses and social media right now.

Our attention spans have been declining since the invention of television. (I suppose a pedant could argue that magazines shortened attention spans trained on books.) The internet massively accelerated the shrinkage of attention spans and smartphones hyper-accelerated that trend. Now stuff flies at our brains faster than the human brain was intended to absorb it. But we are resilient creatures — and our brains are adapting, like our primordial ancestors hauling reptilian butts of the ooze, our brains are evolving in response to an unprecedented, unimaginable flow of information and images.

What is true? What is false? What is AI-generated? What should we do with this information (or disinformation or misinformation)?

Symptoms are often quicker and easier to identify and understand than the complexity of causes. And we’re seeing the symptoms very clearly in online and realtime activism.

The parallels are not yet provable, perhaps, but the outcomes seem obvious. The more people get their information from two-second bites, the more they are likely to set up pup-tents on campus and accuse Israel of “genocide,” “apartheid,” “settler-colonialism” and a litany of other words deracinated from their definitions.

The Palestinian movement has always been where critical thinking goes to die — now rational judgment has been fatally wounded among young people growing up on a bombardment of decontextualized images.

Perhaps beginning with the sinking of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, the drip of information humans are exposed to has grown to a deluge, rising exponentially in the past decade.

Rather than systematizing this information and assimilating it in a rational manner, the human brain, it seems, has often responded like an overwhelmed room-sized computer in a 1960s screwball comedy about the dystopic future, spitting computer cards (kids: ask your grandparents) into the office and sputtering and whirring until it collapses in a smoking mess of submission.

Our brains were simply not meant to take in this much stuff.

In such a scenario, something has to give — but something also has to stick. Amid the blizzard of images, facts and mistruths, allegations, narratives and nonsense, something inevitably remains.

If you visit a North American campus these days, ask students what the most pressing issue in the world is, or just scan the posters and stickers on bulletin boards and bus stops, you would think Palestine was the only country in the world, the only crisis worth considering.

The plausible deniability that this is a symptom of disordered thinking is, well, the facts: This is a crisis. Thousands of people are dead and the tragedy is heartbreaking. Nobody is denying that. That is not where the disordered thinking comes in.

The disorder is in the narrative, which almost unanimously blames the wrong party for why these people are dead and why more seem destined to the same, catastrophic fate.

This war could end today — if Hamas surrendered. The fact that overseas activists are not calling for the thing that would end the dying now tells us everything we need to know. It’s not dead Palestinians they hate. It’s Israel.

By egging on Hamas, demanding continuous war (and therefore more dead Palestinians) until Palestine extends “from the river to the sea” (even while, conversely and incoherently calling for “ceasefire”) activists demonstrate how technology and false ideology meld to form a dangerous, irrational, self-defeating stew.

Palestinianism is a sort of brain hacking, an online and off-line algorithm in which people somehow chant for down, while insisting they support up.

Lacking the mental capacity to assimilate all the information about all the catastrophes in the world, from deadly viruses to climate change to civil wars, the human brain, more primordial than we like to admit, more like the sputtering computer of the 1960s comedy than the actual device we hold in our hand, wades through the mass of information and fixates on one particular, unrepresentative situation.

Since we lack the mental bandwidth to deal with all of the world’s troubles, we’ve basically decided to deal with none of the world’s troubles — except one.

To be fair — it’s not just the kids doing this. The United Nations, that great world parliament, has been fixated on this one conflict for decades, to the detriment of all other peoples in the world. Legacy media has given this one conflict exponentially more coverage over the decades than situations that, based on numbers, deserve far more attention.

There are a few reasons for all this — some to do with human nature, some to do with the centrality of the region in the theology of well more than half the world’s population, some to do with brainhacking devices that have messed up our critical thinking abilities.

But there is another factor. And, yes, I am going there. Because that’s where a big part of the answer is.

For a couple thousand years, whenever the human brain was overwhelmed, whenever life got confusing or scary or overwhelming, people blocked out reality, eclipsed nuance, denied the factors actually at play, glossed over the actual reasons for their situation and projected their issues onto a scapegoat.

It’s happening again.

In a world filled with unfathomable tragedy, we can only focus on one.

And what a coincidence. It’s the one involving Jews again.