Have I got news for you?

Ron Burgundy

In serendipitous fashion, this week’s quit leads on rather seamlessly from the last (if I say so myself). Gossip, as I elaborated last time, is the exchange of factually suspect information, as a kind of escapism from the problems of our own lives. If this is correct, then surely News, as in Current Affairs, is its antithesis.

There is no escaping the bombardment of bad news that we, as people living in an advanced society, receive on a daily basis. When was the last time you switched on CNN to hear about happy things, like the birth of the world’s largest puppy litter?

It's enough to make anyone want to become a hermit

A dire fact of human existence is that we are endlessly curious creatures, greedy for as much information as our brains can handle. In many cases, our eyes are far larger than our minds. After a particularly nasty weekend, however, I was feeling queasy from the amount I had consumed. Enough was enough.

So, in my best imitation of an ostrich, I decided to bury my head in the proverbial sand and avoid any kind of news from infiltrating my consciousness. A hopeless task, some might say.

Yet, pretending the outside world does not exist proved to be surprisingly easy. One need not become a recluse, give up any kind of interaction or even stop reading. In fact, all one has to do is avoid thinking about anything that doesn’t immediately affect you: something we humans do exceedingly well.

It required no real effort at all. What I did was continue life in a hyper-normal manner. During the course of the week I plunged myself into cultural interests, including painting, listening to music and walking around York; I went out every night and drank my own weight in alcohol; I spent a good hour organising my shoes according to colour, heel-size and style. All manner of denial-of-the-outside-world related activity.

I was happy. Mindlessly happy. And it scared the hell out of me.

If Thomas Gray’s old adage of "Where ignorance is bliss, / ’Tis folly to be wise" is true, then where exactly does that leave the intellectual? Well, without bliss, I suppose.

After seeing just how easy it is to ignore everything that didn’t directly relate to me in my day-to-day life, I began to understand how the world is in such a horrific state. You see, we are so exposed to the awful images, facts, figures and statistics fed to us, that they become part of normality. In other words we become hardened or worse, anaesthetised, to them.

Things lose their meaning through repetition, and it's not until there's a skip, a moment of stark nothing before the next incident, that the sheer atrocity hits home. Trauma patients, it is often believed, block out the memory of the event due to the enormity of its impact, as a kind of defence mechanism. The memory is triggered only if a similar event is experienced again, and only then recovery can begin.

Reintegrating myself into the stream of media, and so society, after my brief hiatus has allowed me to understand something. Perhaps we need a constant flow of bad news to keep us from despair. If we keep our minds full of it then there is no time to reflect on the horrors of life. What I mistook as human sadism may actually be a coping mechanism: an attempt to neutralise perpetual threat, and so a survival instinct.

Conversely, it may be a highly conscious decision, as in the case of the intellectual: the need to understand how we can survive amidst such chaos, in order to justify said survival. Such understanding, of course, is ultimately beyond us.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether we are given the good or the bad news first. It doesn’t even matter if we understand it. It doesn’t matter either way because, in the words of Gloria Gaynor, we will survive.

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