Thursday, January 23, 2020

World of Extremes

By Eric Nederlof, CLAC Representative

The last time I wrote a CLAC blog, it was the dog days of summer. Today, I’m writing after going through more than a week with temperatures dipping between -20 to -30 degrees Celsius with wind chills bringing it below -40, and Newfoundland being buried in snow they are measuring in metres. However, weather isn’t the only thing that’s extreme these days.

We also see extremes expressed in some of the actions and rhetoric of political activism; in news, sports, and entertainment reporting; on social media; and even in our labour relations.

Why the need to portray [insert a civic/business leader here] as “the devil incarnate” to justify your opposition to him or her? Is your team’s GM really “not qualified to roster up a team of six-year-olds” because he signed a $6-million ironclad contract your team can’t escape for a past-his-prime left-winger? Does something have to be an “existential threat” that “cuts at the very heart of our society” for it to be deemed worthy to do something about it? Most things aren’t, so they should stop being described with false, inflammatory language.

The interesting thing is that most people live and operate in the middle—yet extreme points of view dominate the airwaves. Calm and reasoned voices are drowned out by headline-grabbing soundbites and hyperbolic tweets. Maybe in this age of social media and reality TV—which has very little resemblance to actual reality—we shouldn’t expect anything different than manufactured drama and extremist shouting.

We exaggerate and hyperbolize to the extreme when the reality doesn’t seem good or bad enough to make our point. However, if the reality of certain circumstances are not enough to justify a certain action we want to take, it is wrong to spin it in such a way to make it sound better or worse than it is. This applies, and maybe firstly, to even seemingly small, personal issues like stretching the truth about the sniffles by saying you have the full-blown flu so you can avoid your commitments. It diminishes society when comments are coloured in the shade we want others to see instead of simply being honest.

I used the terms exaggerate, hyperbolize, spin, and colour, in the above paragraph, which are just synonyms for lying but make it sound better, perhaps even socially acceptable. That’s part of the problem. We shouldn’t accept it no matter what it’s called or by whom, and most of us wouldn’t if we knew enough about the truth to recognize it. Society needs to find a way to prevent all the manufactured, lying noise of false extremes from influencing our emotions and actions. It starts with the majority in the middle keeping us firmly centred on the actual, factual truth.

There’s enough extreme in the real world as it is.

World of Extremes

You might be interested in