Dear social media influencers on my timeline: you’re all trendsetters. Ever the early adopters of whatever it is that’s grabbing eyeballs in the information-attention economy.
Your vast array of talents are needed urgently. Marshall every ring-light and iPhone you can find. Bring every single lapel mic in your household.
Your great crusade is to make morality popular again. A lot to ask from a crowd that will personify any corporation as long as it pays, but times are tough and there aren’t plenty of heroes to go around these days.
The objective of our noble endeavour is clear.
Given the ridiculous amount of powerful individuals who we’ve seen do a full Damascene on us in recent days, the only way to deal with this scourge of insincere conversions is to raise the bar.
All the way across the pond, we’ve seen the disastrous fallout from the bitter bromance between US President Donald Trump and the world’s lamest man, Elon Musk.
Musk publicly claims that the feud is about a spending bill that is set to increase the federal government’s debt. He claims that it undercuts…well, the other cuts to the federal budget. You know, the ones that ended life-saving programmes?
Given that both men lie with the unsettling ease of a two year old who just broke a pricey bit of decor, I hope you’ll forgive me for not wasting too much time with delving into the allegations that were made during this embarrassing moment in humanity’s history.
What I will say about it, though, is that it’s a great case study for neurotic psychology.
When everyone was piggybacking off Trump’s comeback from the political wilderness, Musk was all too happy to bankroll Trump’s electoral campaign. Now that Musk is feeling the squeeze from the same insane policies that he endorsed, Trump is suddenly a horrible human being.
The real tragedy isn’t just that the world’s most powerful politician and the world’s richest wanker are having a public meltdown while Los Angeles burns.
It’s also the way in which ordinary people following this clash from afar tend to defer to those who wield overbearing political and/or financial clout, thereby allowing them to get away with false claims to honesty that are, more than anything else, self-serving.
The latest local example of this kind of abrupt reversal of rhetoric was the Manoel island campaign.
Yet again, we have an instance in which politicians from across the political spectrum, along with the business vultures circling the islet like it was lunch, smelled a change of wind and figured it was time to hop onto another bandwagon.
Though I feel like I am pointing out something which should be glaringly obvious, the fact is that people seem to quickly forget that, just up until a minute ago, the individual under the spotlight was saying the exact opposite.
The two examples I cited above do not amount to situations in which there was a genuine, St Paul style conversion. These weren’t soul-crushing moral revelations that kept Elon Musk, prime minister Robert Abela, or leader of the opposition Bernard Grech up at night sweating bullets, worrying about what posterity will think of the decisions they took today.
These were crude, badly-timed attempts at realpolitik that will inevitably backfire on anyone who believes that the conversation in question is being held in good faith.
Focusing on the local example specifically, both the government and MIDI have kept their cards close to their chest whenever anyone asked about the secretive negotiations between MIDI and AC Enterprises Ltd as well as the actual negotiations (if any) between MIDI and the government itself.
Throughout all this, one struggles to find as much as a trace of morality. It is a disingenuous volte-face that is also an insult to the heritage of major political parties that were born out of a desire to implement different sets of values in practice.
Witnessing a politician or any other person of influence casually strolling from one side of an argument to another without convincingly explaining how their reasoning evolved in the process should immediately set off alarm bells in your head.
Though it is true that every human being is capable of learning new things that challenge any previous misconceptions, it takes a certain kind of person to admit they were completely wrong.
Powerful individuals who will say anything they think will improve their standing aren’t that kind of person. Investment portfolios and electoral campaign coffers are generally considered to be bigger priorities than being brutally honest – unless the appearance of honesty is deemed as the most profitable course of action in a specific situation.
So go on, dearest influencers, make morality great again – though you may need to work on a better acronym since MMGA doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Bring back Aesop’s Fables, but for TikTok. Mock the powers that be. Who knows, maybe people might even start trusting your opinions more if they sound like they’re actually yours!
Christ knows we need all the help we can get these days…
Featured photo: Luca Giordano’s ‘The Conversion of St Paul’ (1690)