The Minefield

Since the start of November, the Australian government has made two significant announcements aimed at preventing the harms that social media platforms are causing to the mental health of adolescents — but are these measures enough?

Most of us are aware that the emergence of social media platforms and their omnipresence in our lives have fractured public discourse and undermined the conditions of democratic deliberation.

But we are only now beginning to grapple with the way corporations — having already decided to make “values” and “ethics” central in their self-presentation to consumers — have become increasingly susceptible to public pressure to deal harshly with employees who express controversial, distasteful or simply divisive opinions.

As a result, limitations on the speech of employees are being tolerated that would rarely be accepted within a democratic society.

“Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.” Such is the assessment of Peter Wehner — a Republican strategist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, and an outspoken critic of Trump himself — in the aftermath of the former president’s thundering re-election victory.

It was not an electoral college landslide of the order of Barack Obama’s in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s in 1996. But it was sufficiently decisive as to command a reckoning. Perhaps most obviously, his victory relegates the Biden presidency to a kind of hiatus within what may well prove to be Trump’s twelve-year dominance of American politics.

The fact that Trump survived all the forces arrayed against him — political, legal, economic, cultural, popular — reinforces the power of his “persecution” narrative, and will likely only deepen Americans’ disdain for democratic institutions. One of the live questions of this election is whether Trump’s resurgence will encourage the would-be-antidemocratic leaders of other nations to follow his playbook.

One of the defining features of the last century is the fact that “evil” has become more vivid to our imaginations and common in our language than “good”. Stan Grant joins Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens to discuss whether “evil” is, in our time, a concept worth holding onto. Or does its use and misuse in our public discourse cause more harm and confusion than good?

There is something undeniably satisfying about revenge. When we feel we have been aggrieved, harmed or humiliated, it is natural to want payback. In ancient Greece, to inflict such an injury was conceived of as incurring a debt — and the only way to make the perpetrator “whole” was to have the injury repaid in kind.

The paradox — as Socrates, Sophocles and Euripides all knew — is that revenge, though it is desired, is never satisfying, because it gives rise to a perpetual cycle of hit-and-retaliation. The future is thereby foreclosed by the need to repay the past. As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”

In democratic politics and geopolitical conflict, the language and logic of revenge have begun to reassert themselves. What can be done to break out of its hold?

Just weeks before a US presidential election, a combination of political mendacity, the perverse incentives offered by social media platforms, and opportunism on the part of content creators/consumers, have come together to form a perfect storm.

The tragic irony is that the devastating consequences of these forces have become apparent in the aftermath of two hurricanes which hit the American south-east in quick succession.

With state and federal elections around the corner, and little more than a year after the failed Voice referendum, can anything be done in Australia to stem the tide of online mis/disinformation? Legislative attempts to hold social media platforms to account are undoubtedly important — but the more urgent task may be addressing democracy’s current “trust deficit”.

After the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the outcome of the Brexit referendum, “populism” became the catch-all diagnosis for everything the ails democratic politics. But its polemical use has tended to obscure rather than clarify the meaning of the term.

The policy of negative gearing — which gives the owners of investment properties an unlimited ability to deduct losses from their overall taxable income — has come to symbolise the disparity between the different ways Australians see home ownership: for some, it is a means of wealth creation; for others, it represents the ever-receding promise of shelter, stability, security.

It is unsurprising, then, that the policy would evoke such strong feelings whenever it re-enters public debate.

Will changes to negative gearing solve Australia’s housing affordability crisis? No. But inquiring into why it elicits such powerful emotions can help us think more clearly about the moral dimensions of our relationship to housing and home ownership.

The war poetry of Wilfred Owen refuses the comfort of hollow consolation in response to the mass loss of life — it also urges the sacrifice of the kind of bellicose pride that sees nothing but territorial gain and national self-interest, and is prepared to offer up the lives of the young to these ends. 

In a time of heightened violence and bloodshed, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens – along with acclaimed concert pianist and award-winning writer Simon Tedeschi – attempt to recover the rhetorical power and moral significance of two of Owen’s best-known poems, “Strange Meeting” and “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”. 

With the US presidential election on the horizon, to say nothing of a number of Australian elections, our airwaves, news sites and social media feeds are filled with political rhetoric.

Many of us have come to accept political rhetoric — with its obfuscations, generalisations, exaggerations and outright evasions — as the price of doing business with democratic politics.

Is there a meaningful difference anymore between political rhetoric and propaganda? What disciplines and constraints must political rhetoric adopt in order to keep itself free of the propagandistic temptation?