Where Has Our Compassion Gone?

We asked HEATHER BENNETT, Solva photographer and artist (above), to elaborate on a comment she made recently asking where our compassion has gone. We are delighted that she found time to send us the following:

It’s a beautiful day today in Solva and I am grateful to live here and have the life I have. Yet internally I am disturbed. One of the things that is nagging at me is the current use by the media of some of our language.

Has anyone else concerns about it? Two things as an example. Using ‘self-deleted’ instead of suicide and referring to ‘deleting people’ instead of killing them. ‘Decapitation’ strikes as well when reporting on the murder of other human being who are on opposite sides or involved in different belief systems. It feels as though using words like this distances people from what is actually happening and their responsibility in it.

Each person who dies loses their own precious life and is lost by all those who love them, whereas this language sounds like merely pressing the delete button on a computer. As though human life is that unimportant.

ua_Bob_Dmyt_ua/Pixabay

Where has our compassion gone?’

A friend from America commented that there ‘unalive’ is becoming a common word for someone who has been murdered.

Another friend says that one reason ‘self-deleted’ is used instead of suicide is because YouTube sends round an algorithm to collect posts with the word suicide in and blocks or de-monetises them.

And now we are facing having to hold a digital identity (or course most of us have that anyway as every tiny move we make online is collected and builds knowledge for those who can use it to make lots of money).  Tony Blair started that one many years ago and we, the public, refused to go there, so maybe we can do it again.  It is not about immigration – look deeper.  It is about eventual total control.

I have worked as a psychotherapist and supervisor for nearly 40 years and find that in one day I can hear completely different accounts of events such as the war in Ukraine or the genocide in Gaza from sincere and troubled clients.  Each person has watched news channels trustingly and has not questioned what they have heard or read, and is equally disturbed by the world view they have imbibed.

It seems more and more difficult to differentiate truth from falsehood – how can the ordinary person know what is really going on?  We are led this way and that by news stations and papers and by the current world leaders, and a lot of it is nonsense created to make people move or think in the direction they (most politicians and world leaders, and no I don’t suffer from paranoia) want us to go.  So I add fake news to my list of language despair.

There is also the ever-increasing use of AI and we are really in trouble.  I have worked as a creative (photographer) for a long time in parallel with my therapy work, and every day now I hear those in the art and creativity spheres worrying about what will happen to their world.

Out of curiosity I put a request into an AI site describing one of my photographs of puffins on the coast with sand eels in their beaks.  Putting my photo and the AI photo side by side it was impossible to tell which was fake.

So fake use of words to distance us from reality, fake news to prevent any thorough understanding of the world’s crises and now fake images too.

One final thing, though, there are more concerns than that floating around inside my psyche – I work with young people who believe they are not good enough.  They communicate through Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok etc and see others doing the same who claim to have amazing lives and who have doctored most of their images to create a fantasy beauty, and these young folk judge themselves as unacceptable and unattractive.

These are often beautiful, vibrant, intelligent young people who arrived with me often because they cannot manage face to face relationships – they have a reduced idea of how to read faces and body language, and they believe everything they read as put up by influencers and friends, who number hundreds and whom they have never actually met. They are in danger of being bullied and some even go into such depths of unhappiness and aloneness that they take their own lives – and yes I do mean they commit suicide not self-delete.

lechenie-narkomanii/Pixabay

I don’t know how we can do it but it is our responsibility to try to sort some of this stuff out.  It is our world and we need to leave it in a fit state for the young to live fully and well. I am aware that some reading this will think it is a rant and dismiss it accordingly, but I am not angry, I just want to put right some of the stuff that has slipped into our world – mainly through the internet and news sources – undetected until we now have big problems.

Anybody got any ideas about how we can slow the process down enough to make sure it is less damaging for the future?  Each of us needs to help.

If you want to comment please contact Kitty at speaktofish@gmail.com. Heather recommends Susie Alegre’s book Freedom to Think, which she says is a real eye-opener.