Originally, I wanted to make this an “open letter” to my fellow Americans about the current state of security. I was going to lecture us for engaging in pointless arguments and conjecture regarding where to place the blame for our security failings and who deserved credit for our success. However, this will not be an “open letter”, though; I will address these issues in this post. That’s right. I’m probably going to offend a few of you. Stick around because you’ll soon discover I’ll offend someone you don’t like. So let’s begin.
There seems to be an incessant desire to inject our personal political beliefs into how we view security. This used to occur only in the domain of national security. Here it was more acceptable, expected, and understandable than in others. In 2014, we saw a dramatic shift in this paradigm. The injection of politics has occurred throughout the spectra of security. Hacks on corporations have occurred in the name of political differences and responsibility assigned (accurately or inaccurately) based on them as well. Even areas thought immune to politics such as personnel security saw this as well. Discourse diluted to regurgitation of talking points. Experts emerged with little to any relative experience or extensive security knowledge but gained popularity because of which side they seemed to agree with. Accusations were cast as fact with little to corroborate them other than innuendo and insinuation from less-than-objective sources.
Today, the discussions of security have become little more than massive pep rallies and virtual lynch mobs. As professionals and practitioners, we rely on credible and objective evidence-based analysis to make informed decisions for our clients. Yet, the current discourse has been infected with vitriol and far-from-honest portrayals. In order to correct our course, we must examine what is occurring and how we can change.
- What happened to having conversations? This is a question I find myself posing quite a bit on social media these days. The dialogues people are having with one another about things in security have been destructive, short on content, and full of conjecture. Twitter is the perfect place to watch this devolution. People shout and angrily dismiss opinions they don’t agree with, in an effort to assert expertise rather than collaborative learning. I don’t pretend to have all of the answers and so I use Twitter and other mediums as a means of learning more. Yet, so many people don’t want to learn. They’d rather spend their time proving you wrong rather than hearing your perspective. In certain cases, I get this. Some ideas are flatly wrong or just an attempt to “troll”. Therein lays our greatest weapon in bringing back sound intellectual discourse – choice. We can always choose to ignore opinions that are not in the interests of learning and sharing knowledge. Yet, we don’t but we need to.
- We seem to like to state our bias but pretend as though it doesn’t matter. Facts are facts but our bias has a great deal of influence on our analysis of those facts. The worse offense we make is allowing our bias to form our opinions. On social media, I have seen a great many of profiles with biographies full of stated or implied bias. Not surprisingly, I find many of these accounts and their timelines to be absent of manipulated or inaccurate facts and vitriolic opinions. When challenged, these accounts retort how much they don’t care that influences them, how the “other side” does it too, and how the challenger’s facts are wrong or formed from the “mainstream media”. Miraculously, these accounts don’t see how this very analysis is influenced by theirs.We all have a bias. We can’t escape it nor should we. That being said, it is incumbent upon us to realize our bias and understand how it influences our analysis and our subsequent opinions. For example, if you don’t know anyone who owns a firearm and never touched a gun before but hold very anti-gun opinions after a friend was shot, it may be prudent to understand how your lack of exposure and the tragic event of losing a friend could have an impact on your opinions about guns. This doesn’t mean you’re wrong but it certainly pays dividends to understand.
- The labels we give people have a tremendous impact on the level of discourse and engagement we seek to have. Come on. Let’s not pretend we don’t know what RWNJ (right wing nutjob), Libtard, Democraps, SJW (social justice warrior), gun nut, thug, un-patriotic, Obummer, and others mean. These are the “nice” labels. Have you ever had someone call you “stupid” after you articulate a point and thought you were going to be taken seriously? Have you ever called someone “stupid” after they made their initial point and expected them to take your argument seriously? No. That’s not how constructive discourse works. We use these labels in order to dismiss people’s arguments because we either fear taking them seriously or we don’t want to listen to them. In some cases, I get this. I do. I get trolled at times and I find it easy (though I resist) to troll back.
If we’re truly interested in having meaningful discussions and want people to take us and our ideas seriously, perhaps we should drop the labels. Our forefathers often engaged in heated debates with another about various topics. However, they recognized their greatest vulnerability rested in their greatest weapon – their ability to compromise. Consensus and commitment can’t occur when you’re busy tearing people (instead of their bad arguments) down. By tearing down our neighbors, our enemies find new allies to defeat us. If there is one lesson we’ve learned this year, it’s that the insider can have the greatest impact. - Stop using tragedy to assert your political commentary. There are few things that rub me wrong than this. I have been on Twitter for little over three years and in that time; I have witnessed countless tragedies as they were happening. With each crisis, there are new experts vying for their voice to be heard among the ever-growing field. During the initial days of the Ferguson riots, I was called upon to give my opinions. It was an experience I will never forget and it gave me valuable insight into how politics with its own agenda shapes much of the dialogue in security. Good or bad, there are a host of issues which impact security and law enforcement which wouldn’t drive as much discussion if it were not for politics.
That being said, I find a great many of “experts” use social media and the settings of tragic events as platforms to inject their personal political allegiance and ambitions in to their “objective” analysis of security issues. Nowhere has this been more apparent and to our detriment than in the recent spate of officer-involved-shootings. There are a host of instances where “experts” have used incomplete, manufactured, outdated, or demonstrative data from corollary events in an effort to support their biased and politically-based opinions. Nowhere but in our current media paradigm do we see and accept this so blindly. - In a world where events don’t matter unless they “go viral” or cause our clients embarrassment, it is strange how we ignore the impact this has on both how information is given and received and why. Even stranger is how we ignore how that happens. Today, you can’t visit a news story and not see a button to like or share the content with others. News organizations no longer make their money off of consumers but advertisers. Ads are custom-delivered to us based on our reactions to various news articles. Many times, we don’t see a story unless it’s “trending”. So if we’re only seeing things based on our reactions to them and it’s solely crafted in its current form to create an emotional response, then why ignore the influence this has on our discussions about these stories?
