We Need A World Cup For Ideas

Nationalistic and sectarian media has an aversion to authentic dialogue and debate; something new is needed

-by Sam Husseini

We need a global town square. Or many.

Our media landscape is dominated by media which is nationalistic in the worst sense and/or sectarian.

The internet, which once promised a World Wide Web of ideas and dialogue is dominated by shadows of those same Big Media outlets and the power of Big Tech, which is using technology much more to surveil, maximize profit and manipulate information than to facilitate honest dialogue.

That mindset of profiteering then proliferates in how many “content creators” and “influencers” on various Big Tech platforms act. They seek to manipulate markets and audiences, nationalist or sectarian, for their perceived personal benefit.

The concept of global citizen seems quaint.

As the farmer poet Wendell Berry writes in his new book The Need to be Whole, it seems “much easier to converse, at a safe electronic remove, with people in whose category you feel you belong. A great many people now seem to have abandoned any willing membership in the great category of ‘all humans’ perhaps because of its implied obligations.”

With the World Cub, on screens around the planet, we can see teams from various nations displaying athletic capability competing against each other.

The competition, whatever its problems (it has its own power dynamics, is commercialized, etc), operates on the field of play by a clear set of laws and rules and at least stands a chance of favoring merit.

Our political and media systems are often exactly the opposite.

The US government, to take the most obvious example, pushes whatever narrative to justify whatever policy it wants. No clear laws or rules are enforced or abided by. Calling it a “law of the jungle” is arguably an insult to the jungle. An example which should now seem tiresome because of its regularity is the US political and media system backing its own massive invasions of countries, holding no one accountable for those crimes— and then posturing with moral indignation at the invasions of others.

The UN General Assembly opening session each year features heads of state speaking in diplomatese for 15 minutes. Actually, that’s not true. Most nations talk for 15 minutes. Here’s Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the General Assembly speaking for 14:41. The US, whoever the president, takes double the time. Here’s Biden clocking in at over 29 minutes from earlier this year.

The powerful simply operate by different rules. It’s as though a US team should get double the number of players on the field.

It’s comical to see Twitter boss Elon Musk, who has spent a lifetime amassing a fortune by commercializing the net and enriching himself with “defense” and “intelligence” contracts, now bemoan how “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.”

As FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley, who has spent a lifetime trying to protect and inform the US public, always reminds us in her signature line in her personal emails: "Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best." --Edward Abbey

There’s little meaningful debate, honest direct competition, juxtaposing of competing ideas with sure fair rules of the road. Rather, they are forced by the powerful.

Big name journalists depend on access to the powerful for jobs, funding, access and what passes for information. Those who actually pursue facts without fear or favor are disfavored by all special interest factions because they can’t be trusted to not be trusted. That is, genuinely journalists who are actually committed to finding the truth as best they can are unlikely to be fostered by media outlets because they could “turn on them” at any time.

The “international order” is run by a bunch of apparatchiks who invoke whatever pretext for whatever action they wish to take. Information, which should be the key to salvation, becomes one of the most powerful forms of repression for the powerful.

The founding visionaries of Pacifica radio articulated much of what we need: “Sound public policy can be developed only when we have the freedom to hear all these ideas presented in the presence of their opposing ideas.”

Indeed, ideas can be better than sports. There need not be winners and losers per se.

I’ve made a habit of listening to the Tao Te Ching the last several years and think it is simply remarkable. It is a profound creation of Chinese culture. Its insights should be proliferated more and more. The current Chinese government, whatever its merits, is clearly authoritarian.

I want the great aspects of Chinese culture and society to proliferate and others to cease.

The same is true for what Frank Lloyd Wright called Usonian society. The US has a great gift for the world: personal freedom. And it has awful aspects. US radio pioneer Lee de Forest, upon seeing the corporate turn radio had taken following the Radio Act of 1927 grew disgusted with his “pet child”. He spoke with dread of how people in the US would become the most vulgar human ever as a result of what was produced by the early electronic mass media.

That mass media has now worked human consciousness for a century.

The promise of the internet is clearly undergoing a similar fate.

What we are now seeing is the opposite of what should happen. The worst aspects of each civilization and culture are proliferating. China has become more commercial, the US has become more authoritarian to take the obvious case.

We saw a similar dynamic with the US and the Arab World over the last number of decades. Which is why you just saw Musk, with Jared Kushner, watching the World Cup match along with seemingly unnamed Qatari royals.

Unless people can gather in rooms, virtual or otherwise, across boundaries of nation and sect in honest dialogue, the future will be molded by the people who indeed, deserve power the very least.