Secrets from the diplomatic world

How to be an informed citizen and not be angry (it is possible.)

I stopped watching TV five years ago. I refuse to listen to the news or the radio for the most part. I turned off all news notifications on my phone. People seem puzzled, “But why? Don’t you need to be informed? But you were a diplomat.” I read articles on topics that interest me but I do not let someone else set the agenda. That is the first mistake that leads to overwhelm and copious self-induced insanity.

We are living in a world of highly charged injustice and a paradigm of profits over people. Additionally, the news media is designed to activate heightened responses and in the process, we may lose our marbles more often then we would like to admit. Sensation, drama and conflict is prioritized. Think about it, when you are trying to get ratings to maximize ad revenue, chaos rules supreme. When I was working for the Georgian Government (one of the fiercely unique and radically anti-Russian countries previously bombed by Russia in a 5-day conflict with an afterglow of a few months to a year, depending on who you ask with about 192,000 people displaced in a short amount of time), I approached Vice and Wired about positive stories the government wanted attention to on educational reforms and technology. I was told point blank that essentially you need a context about the story before the story could go there. So without a drama putting it on the TV, positive does not sell. It became clear to me, the mainstream media was a rollercoaster.

So how do you learn about the world and not throw bricks? There is an art form to consuming media and learning about the world. I work with exceptionally bright and gifted young adults that are misunderstood in a mainstream and challenging world. I help them to understand the greater context of global challenges and showcase stories that are not shown in the media because positivity does not drive retail therapy.

The first diplomatic secret is: to not take it personally.

Even though the news is designed to get a reaction does not mean we have to give it one. Take a moment to reread that again. We do not have to react to the insanity of the world. You may ask, “But there’s so much bad stuff happening!” Yes, but most of it is also outside of our control.

It is not sociopathic to not pay attention to the chaos happening at the world scene, but it is psychopathic to take it all as an assault of values, which is essentially what many people do.

The biggest challenge people typically have when taking in information is that they naturally see it as a threat. In Polyvagal theory, a beautiful neuroscience current which helps us to understand safety and connection with ourselves and others, these types of elements are seen as assaults by our system. To soften these blows, there are a variety of regulation activities we can do but that is not the point of this article. It is even simpler than that. The simplest way to not take news personally is to start doing deep inner work to see what your triggers are, why do these things create such a reaction. That is the true story to be reported here.

Not everyone has the same reaction to a story. It all depends based on the context and factors pushing on your identity, your values and the coping mechanisms you have to keep you in a regulated homeostasis.

I coach people to finding this equilibrium and help people find context so that they can find peace even when they find out about Trump doing whatever or the 69-year old Enbridge Pipeline Line 3 is spilling, yet again. (30 oil spills of 1.1 million gallons of oil through 2017 in watersheds, rivers and drinking water).

Second diplomatic secret: first-hand sources or testimonials to find the real story.

Get your news from sources — documentaries, podcasts, indigenous educators and activists in the field that have first hand accounts of what is happening. One time I was observing elections in Guatemala in an area that had reported to have armed violence in contested elections. We were posted there to monitor the elections and ensure they were free and fair. This was reported internationally. I am a master at getting the true story. The first 3–5 times I asked the question I got the soundbyte — armed gunmen stormed the polling station and stole the urn. After I asked with less people around, I asked again. Finally, I was told the real story. Friends of the mayor came to check in on the election results. The mayor was not even running because he won a seat in the Central American Parliament. The mayor’s friends liked the results they heard and so got so excited that they shot off gunfire of happiness (tiroteo de alegria). People got scared and ran away. The ballots were carried away by the wind. A vast deviation from the reported version. Did the mayor’s friends do something not legal, yeah. Did they threaten people? Not on purpose. Are you supposed to have guests while you count votes? No.

But not everything runs like Santa’s Workshop in the real world. We are talking about a town where it is the Wild West of Guatemala with golden chains with pistol charms on them.

The main takeaway here is that things are misreported and exaggerated for an ulterior purpose of some sort. (The other candidate ending up winning by 26 votes in this town by the way. And we did watch them carry the ballot box to the regional capital. The electricity was turned off during most of this process as a threat.)

Thomas Stephan for Unsplash

Third diplomatic secret: there is a reason why every news story is released when it is released. Bad stuff happens every day and plenty of it.

The best way to have space from the cyclone of violence hitting the world is to realize it is not new and is here for the long-haul until all of us, including Putin, Assad, Merkel, Bolsonaro, Biden, are able to see what influences their decisions and triggers. (In case you think dictators are more likely to start wars, it is more often democracies. Dictators usually perpetuate the status quo.)

Global conflict and injustice are actions done by regular people who just happen to have too much power and sometimes skewed perspectives. If anything, global leaders need to do more of the inner work so that we stop creating our own problems as a society and instead focusing on what we inherited individually and collectively.

The backstory not often told is that news stories are released for a reason. I never thought in a million years I would use a State Department source on this but this applies to all media, not just what happens in Russia, Ukraine, or Mali. News may be a disruption to shift focus from one thing to another. Psychological operations are used to influence the hearts and minds of people everywhere. Despite what we would like to believe, the media is not just “news”.

News is the greatest Hollywood Blockbuster of all time in that what is reported has a purpose — distraction, fear, disruption.

Take Project Mockingbird during the Cold War to cast a specific lens over what was being reported. The most curious thing about this that when doing a basic search on this on Google for this article, a curriculum for the British elementary system has learning material but the American sources try to suggest it was not true despite a brief secret document shared in an exposé by the Washington Post. There is a film on this as well, if you are interested in that, comment on the story and I can post a link.

In fact, many of the projects I worked on had that as a secondary objective. Despite what we would like to believe, millions of dollars of aid are not usually spent on something unless there is a motive.

If charity was the motive for aid, the economic system would have been reversed from free trade to allowing protectionism back when the British were poaching Belgian tapestry makers back in 18th century to build their economy. And additionally, there would be debt-relief for massively exploitative loans made by the World Bank to dictators and conditionality to restructure the country in such a way to make it an efficient resource colony in an era of neo-colonization.

There are no news stories, much less repayments on the $165 trillion dollars, double the GDP of the ENTIRE world in 2015, taken by Spain from Bolivia in the form of coercive extraction of silver during its doctrine of discovery and “saving the souls” of indigenous Bolivians beginning in 1532. (From Jason’ Hickel’s The Divide, Chapter 3, “Where did Poverty Come from?”)

Most of the bad things happening in the world do not make the news media and if they do they are not so easy for the general public to learn about without digging. If you use google, even less so because when you do searches for problems in the world, the results are skewed in the favor of what is the popular thing to know. If you’d like to test it out, google “Is Flint, Michigan’s water drinkable?” And then watch Anthony Baxter’s film, Flint: Who can you trust?

Aramis Paredes for Unsplash

Fourth diplomatic secret: objectivity is extraordinarily subjective.

News is often a one-sided or limited perspective on events that happen, which will become history. Just like it is near impossible to have true objectiveness in most things, the same happens with history. The person writing or narrating the story has their subconscious bias and despite their training, to recount something neutrally does not seem to be a natural human talent. On top of that the person who is reading it also has their bias.

So the moral of the story is look at different sources of information. Question when and why something is released, what are you feeling after you see/hear the information, and what does it remind you of — something in your past, what currents or undertones are running through the story? When you start to see your own triggers, you can see how the news is a parallel for your life (hopefully with less bumps and bangs). Emotional reactions are engineered through these stories, so the bigger story is — why is this creating the reaction in you? Who do the actors remind you of? Ideally process this while doing some form of movement, mindfulness or healing practice. My mantra while on a computer is “shoulders down and back, soften the jaw and face, relax the belly”. We constantly put on armor and when we do, it creates the pattern for the next experience, and the next until we find ourselves shouting at the dishwasher or arguing with the cat.

Even if Roe vs. Wade is overturned, even if wars are going on globally, the capacity for peace begins by looking at what you can control and making peace with all you cannot. While at the same time, connecting with activists on topics that are dear to your heart and not accepting the future of the world depends on you and you alone. It is a collective responsibility. Our emotions are ours to feel but at the same time are stirred up by all that we have yet to process.

How to start processing big emotions? Check out my earlier article on The Truth about Healing.