It’s easy to stop seeing things. Playing Super Hexagon, it’s easy to get lulled into believing you know what the pattern is even when you haven’t been looking closely, to dodge what you believed the obstacle was only to run smack into what the obstacle actually is. Drawing from life, as well, it’s easy to begin drawing the things you don’t actually see, the fingers that aren’t visible and the shape that you know a nose to be rather than the shape needed to convey the image of a nose at that angle. Over and over this pattern repeats – the pattern that there is no pattern so consistent that following it is an adequate replacement for paying some goddamn attention.
It’s impossible, though, to always be vigilant. Sooner or later, everyone slips up. It turns out something that we never noticed was a huge problem waiting to manifest, and the fire catches. We were not made to be panopticons, but to be a series of watchtowers, each covering one another. To make modern life manageable, we’ve designated some people to be attention-payers so that we don’t have to be constantly vigilant: Reporters, emergency workers, various supervisors and surveyors, researchers and teachers.
It’s not a coincidence that these are the people who are being most actively sabotaged or corrupted by the reigning government right now. The obvious effect of controlling the groups who manage this flow of information is that it makes it more possible to misinform and propagandize. The less obvious effect is that the veracity of this information is now poisoned. If we accept this information is compromised, then the burden of vigilance, without benefit of expertise and experience, falls back on our shoulders. Those in power have a vested stake in making us too tired to be vigilant. In making sure we can’t trust the news, or the schools, or the research.
After a certain point, vigilance metastasizes into hypervigilance. After a certain point being woke turns into sleep deprivation. Vigilance and action both take energy, and it’s so difficult to manage both, especially when there’s so much to see and so much to act against both at the same time.
The worst part is that, now that we’re paying attention, it means knocking away even more of that support structure. Now that we look, those who we thought we could trust turn out to no longer be trustworthy, and must be replaced – and there, again, the load of vigilance increases. People we knew we couldn’t trust are fired and replaced, and we must again be vigilant to be sure this replacement is suitable.
Is the idea of every person voting realistic when the burden of being informed about the issues and those who represent them becomes this heavy? We are in a situation where we demand people make important decisions without equipping them with any tools to make those decisions well. They turn to ask whoever they think they can trust most, and in turn that person asks whoever they think they can trust most, and eventually they probably reach someone who isn’t trustworthy. Because the demands of awareness are unappeasable, democracy becomes a merit-test for the most convincing and efficacious liar. Because there isn’t enough time and energy to survive and to do the research needed to be informed, we’re all operating on partial information, fake information – so the one who can sow the most doubt wins.
We have few ways of dodging this burden too heavy to bear. Everyone puts their trust in someone, and many of us put it in the wrong someone, or in someone who puts it in the wrong someone. Once you make that decision, it’s really hard to change. No matter how terrible that decision was, it’s hard to go back on it because it means accepting, first, that the person you thought you could trust you cannot – and, second, that the burden of eternal vigilance now, again, rests on your shoulders.
So we make excuses. It was probably a lie, it probably wasn’t that big a deal, it’s probably not what it looks like. What we are seeing now is a really terrifying glitch in democracy: The more horrendous the worldview of a political organization, the heavier the burden that falls on those who had heretofore followed that organization. In order to break with the organization, they need to not only accept that they’d propped up people who had done great evil, but to believe that they could be vigilant enough to keep from doing so again in the future.
Faced with this terror, most will just vote along party lines.