kony.

a friend and i were texting one day, and it turned into an email, in which i asked him to write me a positional essay. here it is.

Perhaps I misrepresented my opinions on social media. I do believe in the inherent goodness of Facebook and other social media and in their massive potential for inciting positive change. However, when considered alongside Facebook's privacy concerns, extremely corporate nature, and its widespread implementation for mostly trivial interactions (and Facebook's lack of condemnation of this observation), I feel that Facebook's role in affecting global culture in a positive way is still formative, and thus I cannot accurately judge it except from the outside. Succumbing to it's allure would erode my ability to judge it's actual worth. Plus I've had one for so long it's time to change the control variable and observe it from the outside. Anyways, to illustrate why the idea of the Kony2012 campaign is so attractive I want to present a few quick facts. 1. Over the next few years, many US police departments will begin deploying flying drone cameras. 2. Monsanto and other corporations are currently fighting to make it illegal to use crops who's genes are not patented 3. The FBI has admitted to the creation of programs designed to search for keywords throughout the Facebook and Twitter networks to uncover possible conspiracy against the government. I think you can gather the trend among these facts and the many others that probably come to mind. It seems that technology and information are being used against those who have less access to them. Orwell and Huxley made wild dystopian predictions that are quite similar to these instances. So now it's obvious why the campaign is successful. Nobody wants to believe that citizens cannot utilize information to motivate their government towards their needs. That is one of the basic principles of our country's founding. It's even in the Bill of Rights (the right to petition the government). Also, nobody wants to admit that Capitalism might fail as a system. Hell, even admitting that Capitalism is successful forces one to realize the selfish nature of humanity, so what does it say if even that can't work. Capitalism enables corporations and governments to acquire extreme resources and unprecedented amounts of information. I think a lot of people believe that the key to the future is to keep the public's access to such things on an equal plane. That video has 73 million views. That's almost a quarter of the US population. So the anger at the implication that governments and corporations have default power over the people evokes an emotional response that is doubled by the intense subject matter. I mean this case has it all: white guilt, protection of children, abhorrence of dictatorship, disgust of rape and war, and I think most importantly, every human's intrinsic desire to feel like they can affect humanity in a positive way. Now I'm not saying either way whether I support the movement. I am aware of their controversies with money and their association with the not-quite-upstanding Ugandan Army. But I just wanted to stress the motivations for the movement's popularity. My first reaction after watching it was to research any debate by detractors of the movement, but I think that firmly places me in a minority who's influence grows more precarious everyday. I think you know what I'm getting at. Most people choose to believe it based on faith. Not Faith. That word does not deserve the distinguished introduction of a capital letter. I define faith as the taking of a position as your own without the authority to do so. That authority comes from proving the truth of that position and weighing it against other options. The reason I find faith so disturbingly dangerous is that it not only invites blind adherence to whatever movement is trendy, (again, not saying I support or detest it) but it is pretty much at the root of the issue inspiring that movement. Kony abducts children to use as soldiers for a very simple reason. Children are easy to teach. Except, where he might say teach we would probably say indoctrinate. This is because children trust. In effect, they have faith. When you tell a child that a stork flies in the window and brings their newborn baby sister, they believe because they have not yet learned that people lie, and they have no other knowledge of how babies are made. As soon as they are presented with contrasting evidence, maybe in the form of a sex-ed textbook, they begin to question. But the fact is that the deeper and more isolated the indoctrination, the more extraordinary the concepts can convince the child of, and the more extraordinary the evidence needed to convince them of it's falseness. One of our greatest human weaknesses is found in one of our principle means of survival. Confirmation bias. Confidence. Perseverance. What ever you want to call it, it helps us to do great things, but it sometimes inexorably impedes us from considering another position. Now, even ignoring the fact that he uses Christian dialogue and dogma, I see Kony's systematic indoctrination of children into soldiers as a distilled allegory of religion as a whole. Somebody shows a Bible to a child, teaches them it is a source of great wisdom, and relates it to the mundane affairs of their life. As they grow, they form new brain connections and build life experience in response to the manner of education that inspired that growth. Breaking a person out of religious faith is like breaking someone from a drug addiction. It is nearly physical. So when I hear, “There is nothing more intimidating than the cold gaze of a child soldier,” I think, “and a religious zealot, because they are the same being.” A problem unique to children is that before they even have access to information that could negate what they are being taught, they perhaps have undergone a regimen of daily indoctrination of many many years. That's a lot of faith to be toppled by a single observation of cosmology or the failures of Biblical archeology or whatever evidence one might offer as retort. Now to see how a child's faith can become damaging as an adult, I'll end with a quote by Vincent Otti, Kony's deputy-leader until 2007 when Kony executed him over a disagreement: "Lord’s Resistance Army is the name of the movement, because we are fighting in the name of God. God is the one helping us in the bush. That’s why we created this name, Lord’s Resistance Army. And people always ask us, are we fighting for the Ten Commandments of God. That is true, because the Ten Commandments of God is the constitution that God has given to the people of the world. All people. If you go to the constitution, nobody will accept people who steal, nobody could accept to go and take somebody’s wife, nobody could accept to innocently kill, or whatever. The Ten Commandments carries all this.”