When the big powers bullied the weak but often still ended up losing

It was repugnant, grotesque, disgusting.

For the first time in history, the whole world was able to watch a big power bully a smaller country on live TV. The trivialization of a national suffering and the open mockery of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had been broadcast across the globe. But unlike President Macron of France, and Prime Minister Starmer of the United Kingdom, who had visited the Trump White House earlier the same week and attempted to placate the US President by indulging his whims, Zelensky had the courage to respond to the accusations, make his case against the impossibility of dealing diplomatically with Russia without strength and security guarantees, and defend himself and his stance. He did not bow down, despite the provocative attack.

As a Greek from Cyprus, I have lived in a land that throughout its long history has been conquered, through both diplomacy and war, by all the mighty powers of the Mediterranean. I understand intimately that conversations much like the shocking spectacle we all witnessed in its raw “red in tooth and claw” form have recurred thousands of times throughout history – albeit as a rule behind closed doors. The first person to document one such conversation verbatim was, in fact, the Greek historian Thucydides, who covered the twenty-seven-year-long Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC. The highlight of his History is the famous dialogue between the Athenian delegation and the leaders of Melos, a small island in the Aegean sea.

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We allow the news to affect our mood, emotions, overall state of mind.

But if we analyze the matter, we will discover that current affairs in different parts of the world have no effect on our everyday life. Whether we read the news today or not, nothing will change in our daily routine. Nothing will change in our real life.

You are sitting at your office right now reading the news. Or you are in your living room at home, or on the commuter train. There are dozens of events that you are being exposed to, covered by journalists in your own country or around the world. In the past month, you have read about hundreds of other events – mostly negative ones, like wars, murders, robberies, and catastrophes, but also positive ones like the opening of a new wonderful exhibition in Paris, a new policy in Japanese schools, the cleaning of Sicily’s coastline. Most of these news items you will forget in a few weeks or months. They will have appeared and have vanished in your life just like that, leaving no trace whatsoever.

Yet many if not most of us allow the news to affect us psychologically because we mentally connect with the events and the people affected by those events – usually aided by detailed descriptions, photos, and videos. We are empathetic creatures who cannot avoid placing ourselves at the center of a hurricane, in the trenches of war, next to the weeping mother who has just lost her son – our imagination instinctively runs to those places, and we often feel in our very bones some of the emotions experienced by people so far away from us. At other times, we cannot help but identify with the plight of whole groups of peoples, even nations. Some of us become obsessed with following a war, or a shocking trial in the US, or the live rescue of a man trapped in the rubble after an earthquake. Sometimes, these faraway happenings touch us deeply, disturb us, even keep us awake at night while brooding over them. In the modern digital world, where we are flooded by the constant stream of news and “information” from every single corner of the web – news sites, YouTube, X, TikTok, Facebook, and more – we find it all the more difficult to cut off from what is transpiring around the globe. So, although these events have no direct effect on our lives, paradoxically, they end up having a mental, psychological, and emotional effect on us.

We cannot even remain neutral with respect to political events, because our friends ask us to take a stance on this or that event happening at the other end of the world – as if our opinion will have any effect on the event. We are connected through invisible threads with all these thousands of happenings that come into (or should I say … invade) our lives from a multitude of sources. And we allow the mental connections that these events engender to affect us.

But current events is not all! Nowadays, on social media, so many of us end up following the lives of certain people – the trips of travel influencers, the op-eds of bloggers, the episodes of favorite podcasters or vloggers, the tweets of various people on X, the output of “content creators” on YouTube or TikTok. We can even envision a future time when every single person on the planet will be a “content creator” of some form while also being a “follower” with respect to the content of others! All this “created content” that vies for our attention may still be considered a form of “news”: We don’t want to miss a post or something in the lives of those we follow. The old traditional media (now called “legacy media”), as well as all the new digital ones, compete for our attention and, more importantly, for our “engagement” – this weird new “digital currency” that has basically replaced the $1 we used to pay thirty years ago for the newspaper.

Our preoccupation with news and our endless struggle to stay abreast of all the happenings that the digital world throws at us has become quite overwhelming. How many hours did we spend in the past decade consuming already forgotten videos and posts and tweets? All having taken our attention for a little while only to rapidly vanish forever into the void of Insignificancy in which Pandamator Time dumps everything.

But it need not be so.

We can escape from the tentacles of news when we become more aware, more conscious of this phenomenon. And the first step is to realize that we don’t need to know about a catastrophic earthquake in Tibet, a brutal murder in Sweden, a flood in the Philippines, a big concert of some famous pop star (that we have never heard of) in Argentina. Why should we know? How can such knowledge of a distant event be of any usefulness to us? There are over a thousand strong earthquakes (above 5 Richter) a year in the world; over a hundred floods; at this very moment, there are over a hundred armed conflicts around the world (big and small). What value or purpose is there in “following” all these, i.e., becoming preoccupied with their many details? And of course, we definitely don’t need to know about the finances, divorces, misdemeanors, or whereabouts of the rich and famous.

In other words, it’s important to understand that to know of and follow all these events is a choice we make. There is nothing that forces us to follow them. For some of the events we follow, we make a conscious choice; for others, we are unconscious – say, we just switch on the TV or start scrolling on TikTok and allow the machines to serve us whatever journalists or algorithms decide to choose for us. Conscious or unconscious, it is still a choice.

The second step is to meditate on the simple fact that, as mentioned above, none of these events alter our reality at this very moment or tomorrow or this month. In a sense, all these events are as irrelevant and as distant to our lives as the explosion of some supernova in a faraway corner of the universe. They are just events happening in a cosmos replete with a myriad of events. And we are impervious to these events.

Therefore, when we feel disturbed by the news, we may always step back, focus on the present moment, and realize that it cannot be affected by these faraway events.

At this point, one may retort: But what about political activism? To be politically active, don’t we need to follow the news in order to form political and other opinions and act accordingly as responsible citizens? Well, political activism is something you may or may not decide to become involved with, but this is not actually something that is dependent on news per se. Once you become involved in some cause, you may seek out the news to see if your activism has brought concrete results, but yet again, this would have no real effect on your everyday life – even though it may probably have some medium- or long-term effect on some other people’s lives. That said, when the activism of others has reached you and there’s a protest march passing in front of your house, that’s not really “news”; the march is already part of your everyday reality because it is affecting you.

The third step is to realize that all these events “happening” somewhere only happen for us when we learn about them! If we do not seek them, they do not enter our life; in a sense, they do not exist, just as the myriad events in the universe do not exist for us since they do not cross our life’s-path. Being mindful of this simple truth allows us to mold or alter completely the very idea of what constitutes “news” or “important information” in our life. Which brings us to something important: We know that there are a number of people around the world who have made the conscious choice not to allow any news to enter their lives – be it the monks on Mt. Athos, the Buddhist hermits in the Himalayas, the recluses of all types, or the simple farmers in the countryside who live in harmony with nature away from society and the happenings of the world. For all these people, the “news-universe” in which we live does not exist at all. I experienced this firsthand when I visited Mt. Athos: Whenever I tried to share “newsworthy news,” I was met with indifference. I quickly realized that the monks inhabit a world in which spirituality and immersion into the Invisible Reality is way more real and substantial than anything happening in the outside world. Having cut themselves off from society, our world with its mundane preoccupations in a sense ceases to exist for them. Such an extreme stance shows the rest of us that it is still possible to have a full and satisfying life while being completely ignorant of what is going on around the world.

The general attitude of the monks and hermits is actually not very far from what was the case for millennia! Until about two centuries ago (before the Industrial and subsequent Information Revolutions), the overwhelming majority of mankind lived in their relatively isolated communities with minimal knowledge of what was happening in the rest of the world or even in much of their own country.

To give a single example, the Greek War of Independence began with the revolt of Alexandros Ypsilantis on February 22, 1821, in Moldova. The first mention of this in the London Times appeared on April 12, i.e., it took seven whole weeks for the news to reach London. But even then, the emphasis was not on the “current events” that were already quite old but on the meaning and repercussions of the event on the Ottoman Empire and Europe in general. The news was intertwined with its context, which was why op-eds and political and other analyses were as (if not more) important than the news itself. People never worried about not being abreast of current events happening thousands of miles away. The most important “news” was rather … the neighborhood gossip, because whatever happened to the neighbor or the priest or the village mayor most often did have an effect on people’s everyday lives.

Well, maybe the fourth and final step to liberate ourselves fromthe news’ suffocating tentacles is to actually … go back in time and pretend we are living in the nineteenth century! We may, for example, disconnect for a week or two from all the news and discover that we didn’t miss it. Being disconnected will actually allow us to have more time, more peace of mind, more energy to pursue our creative endeavors. It is not by chance that more and more people nowadays seek retreats in remote places to disconnect from the digital information-flood in order to reconnect with their center and creativity. And, if we are courageous enough to stay disconnected for seven whole weeks, we may discover upon returning, refreshed and reenergized in the world, and picking up an old-fashioned newspaper, just like the Londoners in 1821, that in spite of the fact a new war has unfortunately started a few thousand miles away, we are still going to shower today, go to the fruit market, meet with our friends in the evening (who have missed us after such a long absence), have a nice dinner, and read a book before going to bed. The war has not touched our day …

The digital world has obtained a life of its own and has now begun to conquer the real world.

On the Ides of March 2019, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist, entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Carrying multiple guns, he killed fifty people and injured fifty more before he was arrested by the police. Tarrant had first announced his imminent attack on social media, invited people to watch the event on Facebook Live, and then filmed and broadcast his murderous spree as if it were a video game: He mounted a camera on his helmet that overlooked the tip of his shotgun ensuring a first-person angle as is done in most violent video games where the player’s task is to kill as many enemy combatants as possible. He then went on to kill innocent people praying in their house of worship while his camera filmed his killings in the exact same manner as is done in shooter video games. Many people who watched the video online where it quickly propagated were not sure whether this was part of a movie, a video game, or a real shooting. In effect, his video broadcast was transmuted into a digital action game, only now this game was being enacted in the real world with real weapons and bullets, real human beings, real mayhem, blood and death.

But the killing itself is not the most shocking part! More disturbing are the comment threads on the anonymous message board 8chan, where Tarrant’s initial announcement was posted, as well as the comments on other similar websites where many users conversed about the video as they watched it unfold live on their screens. One user complained that the streaming video was in low resolution and he could not see the killing clearly! Another user delighted in the fact that the video of these real killings was better than his favorite shooter game, another said he loved the music Tarrant played as he drove to the mosque, and so on. Many were cheering: One wrote “nice shootin.” Another, “Tarrant is a f***ing hero.” While another, “You’re an inspiration to all of us, mate.” A few mockingly addressed the poor victims with disrespectful and very disturbing comments like “Piling into the corners like rats is not how you survive this sort of shit. Buncha cowards…” In another forum where Tarrant’s video was posted, it achieved a rating of 3.5 stars. Thousands of people actually searched for and clicked the thumbs-up button under the video in order to rate a real murder video as if it were any other video! Others lamented that Tarrant’s association with 8chan might be the end of the site.

Apart from the utter sickening disgust I felt while reading these posts (which made me fall into depression for a few days), my constant feeling was that all these people were completely detached from the reality that Tarrant was hunting and killing real innocent people in real time. Many of these comments give the impression that a movie or video game was being discussed, as opposed to a murder spree in the actual real world.

It is now beyond obvious to me that we have entered the era in which many people truly live in the digital world. Literally. The digital world is the only world they know. And when they go out into the real world, some of them feel the urge to reenact, like in a video game, the very actions they are engaged in while inhabiting this digital world. Their world is not even the composite of a computer graphic world and a real world. What seems to be happening is actually even more frightening: There is no real outside world for them anymore. There is just this one digital world that extends to incorporate the real world. It is a unitary world governed, ruled, defined by the imaginary graphic world of violent video games that have become so much more real than the real world that the latter has unconsciously been absorbed and incorporated by them into the former as a subset.

Through the thousands of hours he had spent playing shooter games (and more recently, of course, practicing in real shooting ranges), Tarrant had gradually lost his ability to relate to other human beings qua human. The digital world he was inhabiting for many hours every day had no relation to the real world. Therefore, when he finally decided to “go on a mission,” he did not see real human beings in front of him. He saw “objects,” “moving targets,” dehumanized beings that were similar to the animated graphic figures he was shooting when he played video games. The outside world completely merged in his mind with that of the violent video games and lost its real nature. Eerily, this is also the cornerstone of twenty-first century military warfare, with the thousands of layers placed between soldiers and combat – drones, guided missiles, radar-enabled weaponry and augmented reality HUDs, all designed to reduce “the enemy” to dots on a screen. The digital soldiers’ detached actions extract the life-force of the people they kill before they do so.

But there is still an even more insidious and stealthy reality that dawned upon me: Tarrant was not being hailed as a hero by the gamers just because the latter are “racists and haters.” What I read through the lines was their admiration for Tarrant having had the courage to enact in the real world what they themselves do all day long in the digital world (shoot to kill) and what they themselves would like to have done had they boldly ventured into the outside world (kill the Muslims they loathe). By his killings, Tarrant was also making a definitive bold statement: Our gaming world need not be confined in the digital; it has the power to modify the real as per “our values” and our own modi operandi. The very first sentence of Tarrant’s post on 8chan says it all: “Well lads, it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make areal life effort post.” Through his actions, Tarrant was in effect leaving the digital world and digital postings in order to make “a real life effort post.” His killing was a type of posting. A posting that left the screen and forced real life to conform to the digital worldview of gamers. He became a hero because he achieved the superhuman feat of expanding the domain of this particular digital world through his own actions. Of course, when he sought to venture outside this familiar digital world and boldly extend its domain, at the point where the two worlds finally met, a huge catastrophe ensued. The digital world overwhelmed the real and absorbed it into its cruel, unfeeling, dehumanizing virtual graphic worldscapes.

The digital world’s worst elements are spreading out into the real world. Unless we address the matter fast, our youth, and consequently our future civilization, is in grave danger.