The Age of Distraction

THE AGE OF DISTRACTION: From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn

As the recent reverse-reality black comedy at the BBC over a clumsy edit of a Donald Trump rambling rant has shown us, better than almost anything else, that as far as journalism is concerned, we do not live in an age of truth seeking, but in an age of distraction. How could it be otherwise when excess is advertised as lifestyle, when we continue to golf while the forest on the hill burns and we surf on the tsunami that will destroy the nuclear reactors on the shore? What does it matter that Trump did actually say what the BBC spliced together, only fifty minutes later? It took him that time to wind up the psycho-malice and turn his tangential blethers into a spectacle. No matter, either, that almost everything Trump says publicly is a fantasy. According to CNN, in a single interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes earlier in November, Trump told eighteen verifiable lies. Every one of his public utterances grinds truth down into the bleak domain of sadistic and narcissistic cruelty. We turn on our TV’s and we are instantly there: down among the glitter-ball inversions and obligatory shootouts which are the aesthetics and the theme noises of the age of distraction.

Meanwhile economic imbalance and suffering goes on and the politicians and captains of capital make very sure there is no equilibrium available to curb the necessary excess. We must be dissatisfied with what we have and we must want more. Our desires must be designed to be unobtainable, no matter how much useless stuff we have. The economy must grow, even if it kills us all. To suggest otherwise is to be looked upon as a know-nothing heretic. Those in power and who control the narrative, can lie through their teeth, but you, who have no power or access to influence, cannot tell the truth.

What do facts matter anyway when an alternative can be found almost immediately on a smart phone? Oh, and while you’re online, you can buy the most ridiculous thing you will never need. The consumer beast must be fed. Your distraction is their purpose. The planet may be being gassed to death but you really do need an air-fryer. That your air-fryer is killing you is irrelevant in this algorithmic age where the production and delivery of knowledge is the result of mining dodgy data. We can be choked to death by the gas from car exhausts as well as by the fog of those who decide what we know and through which medium we know it. The invention of artificial intelligence has smoored the boundaries between what is true and what is false, so much so that no-one can tell the difference, as the social and media platforms encourage us not to care. Have a good time, even if it makes you miserable  Gamble responsibly until you are broke. The contemporary consensus is that there is no consensus. Good/bad, true/false, reality/fantasy – it’s all about the likes and followers and the reigning paradigm behind it is always power – who wields it and who profits from it. It is the power to control and influence you, your choices, your future – your life: to distract you from reality, to encourage you to distrust reality.

In the age of distraction big lies work better than small lies. The theory is that no-one believes that the big lie is untrue because it is kept simple. It is repeated ad infinitum because repetition becomes truth. Also the peddlers of distraction always need an enemy to blame – an “other” to belittle and condemn. Distraction feeds on outrage. It also generates fear which is easier to seed than reason. If there is any question of the message being doubted the tactic of distraction is to play on base emotions. These are more controllable and exploitable than passion, which is dangerous and unpredictable. In the age of distraction there is no morality, only the incessant demand for total loyalty to the ruling nothingness.

In the fourteenth century the great Persian poet Hafez wrote that.

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.”

This compassionate and antinomian sentiment is obviously unknown to Shabana Mahmood, the Ukanian Home Secretary, who seeks to deny help to those asylum seekers who can work or have assets. These so-called “reforms” will also include people seeking sanctuary, those who are washed up on the pebbly beaches of the South coast of England on the incoming tide of poverty and war, instead of being able to apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years they will now have to wait twenty years before they can apply for permanent settlement. Those who are fortunate enough to be granted asylum will be returned to their home countries when they are “considered safe”, a policy modelled on the current controversial Danish system. It is in fact not modelled on any system but on racism and the Labour Government’s fear of Reform UK sweeping them away at the next election. This is not governance, it is electioneering. Not content with that, when met with reasonable criticism of her “policy”, Shabana Mahmood reverts to the big lie of fear, that “dark forces are stirring up anger” and that the “country is being torn apart” over he issue of immigration.

The Home Secretary’s “country”, of course, is Ukania – not Scotland. Here we have a shrinking working age population, the very demographic which creates wealth and a stable economy – and our problem is not immigration but emigration. Historically, Scotland has been emptied of her people.  We cannot afford the fear and racism at the heart of this Labour Government’s distracting obsession with immigration. Scotland desperately needs new workers and we should be able to welcome them wherever they come from and encourage them to participate in the progressive project of building a Scotland that is fit for human beings to live in. A country that Mike Small here on Bella (‘Liberation’ and the JTPI Fallout) suggests should

“…be re-made from the ground-up and needs to be a celebration of Scotland as a multi-cultural contemporary society.”

The irony here is that the very restrictive measures Shabana Mahmood is desperate to legislate in would make the settlement of her own parents in Ukania very difficult, if no impossible. The distraction here is that those who are the victims of war and famine are now considered more dangerous than those governments and systems which run wars and produce famine. Will the 28,000 Ukranian who have sought sanctuary in Scotland from Putin’s savage invasion of their country be forced to return to Ukraine whether there is a ceasefire or not, ignoring the contribution they have made to our society and the lives they have built? This applies also to refugees from countries Ukania has helped to destroy, such as Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Eritrea, Kashmir and Afghanistan – not forgetting Palestine. In truth, Shabana Mahmood’s proposals offer little in the way of distinction – students, children – and has the air of Winton Churchill’s instruction on foreign “aliens” during World War Two – “Collar the lot!”. There are “More than 100,000 people now live in asylum accommodation, funded by the taxpayer.” The Home Secretary tells us in The Guardian (Dark forces are stirring up anger in the UK. My asylum reforms are our chance to stop them) so be afraid, be very afraid. She goes on,

“Unless we act, we risk losing popular consent for having an asylum system at all. In a country that is seeing division stirred up on our streets, we will not bring unity unless we restore order to our borders.”

This is fear being used to distract from reality because it ignores history. Historically, Scotland has not been free of actively participating in colonisation and imperialism – our role in the development of the British Empire is testament to that. It is because of this racist and exploitative past that we must construct our future so that it is free of similar criminality. To do this, we must resist, to the full extent of the powers of Holyrood and beyond, these dreadful Home Office measures on asylum. In this, the people have to become the parliament of Scotland. This new legislation, if it comes into force, will make the refugee situation worse and it will drown in bureaucracy. If, as Labour claim, the system is broken, then we in Scotland can mend it with compassion.

The system that is truly broken is capitalism. Until the gap between the top 1% of wealth receivers is shared with the 99% of wealth creators people will forever be forced to migrate along the hope-roads and sea-ways of the world in order to seek justice and a better life. You can no-more “Stop the boats”, as Reform UK and other reactionaries declare, than you can “grow the economy” on a planet of finite resources. To say this out loud is to attract the wrath of political and economic orthodoxy even if all you are doing is pointing out the obvious societal instability and the dissatisfaction which this brings.

What politicians such as Shabana Mahmood and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves represent is a failure of imagination. They also represent the totalitarian nature of mainstream opinion. What they exclude is the poetry of possibility. By doing so, they trap us in an inevitable downward spiral   – the policy isn’t working so greater doses of austerity must be applied. To think and act otherwise would be too heavy a lift for current political and economic theory: they are going nowhere. Poetry, however, is the art of the traveller, of the refugee and the asylum seeker – it is a portable art. Poetry means that you do not lose yourself or your country, no matter where you are. You always belong because you belong to poetry. This allows you to transcend distraction, engage your imagination to understand that we are coming to the end of something political and economic and that we have to create a material space in which to live better lives where we consume less and care more. If we don’t then fear and the age of distraction will desensitise us all. Then what?

 

©George Gunn 2025