Can Steemit Make Us All Better People?

Are you a decent human being? Are you? Aren’t you? Which is it? When did you last demonstrate altruism? When did you last experience an act of altruism? Do you not care because they don’t, is that it? Or do you care because they care? How much guilt do you harbour? None at all? Do you ever feel bad when you see others outside of your family suffering? Does it affect you? Does it bother you? Why didn’t you do anything? Was it not your problem?

Was it nothing to do with you because your children slept safely in their beds that evening? Was it nothing to do with you because your girlfriend was on Facebook talking to her friends and loving every second of it? Or was it nothing to do with you because you had a can of lager in your hand and saw Arsenal kick the crap out of Chelsea? Perhaps it was nothing to do with you because you had to get up early the next day for work? Or maybe it was nothing to do with you because you are a policeman and have a very important role in society?

Don't you hate the superficiality of some people who use social media to construct a person and personality that they are simply not. Some people are very good at it while others show cracks very early on in their digital personality. Now this is where Steemit has the potential to be different. Whilst there is an expectation for Steemers to produce appealing content there is also plenty of space for anonymity and therefore I believe this combination produces a very conducive environment for genuine creative expression.

What can you really expect from people today in our society? Are there values to which we as human beings share, and if there are, as I believe there are, then from these shared values are there expectations? Should we ask of expectation? We often hear governments speak of rights and responsibilities and that seems to me to be a plausible view of people’s position in society. We frequently hear people castigating government and very often with very good reason, but government isn’t always the source of the problem the people themselves are frequently the source. It’s a two way process. However, if you take government out of the equation for a minute and strip people living in contemporary European and American society down to their basic elements, incorporating all of the multi-cultural communities, multi-ethnic societies and multi-religions that exist, what do we have? Clearly we have many different things but how much of that is good and how much of it is bad?

Who are the truth seekers? How many of us care about the truth? It’s a fair estimation that if you asked a cross section of society if they were a fan of the truth they would reply with a resounding yes. But if they are keen to admit their passion for veracity then why do they not seek it? I would suggest that part of the reason is that it is quite often a very difficult thing to achieve, some times it is almost impossible.

If we look at the mainstream media, as one source of ‘truth’, there we encounter a problem with truth and authenticity. It is not a simple case that the reporter, journalist or newsreader tells us the news. Much more personal analysis is required to ensure that the news we see and hear is only being told to us and not engineered for us with all of the distortions, manipulations and exaggerations engineering comprises. Therefore with so much effort required to obtain the truth most people probably don’t want to be burdened with such a challenge, they lose interest or they don’t care. Some times they get scared though.

With so many media images of events besieging us via so many platforms the excuse of ignorance is diminished, so how, as human beings living in contemporary society, are we responding to such matters? Do we actually care? Do we try not to care? Are these events completely outside of our control? Are we really powerless to do anything, if not what is it we can do? Or are these issues so horrible that we simply hope they'll go away?

Politicians, journalists and the general public often speak of voter apathy. Much debate has been generated in an attempt to determine the reasons for voter apathy and yet in an age where more and more interactive media is available to cast a vote apathy still persists as a serious problem in voter behaviour. However, whilst this indifference is curious it isn’t exclusive to voting it extends beyond voting. Surely it is human apathy in general that engenders apathy in voting attitudes? So the issue again returns to our ability, as human beings, to demonstrate what precisely is it that, outside of our own families, we care about. If the truth is that indifference is so pervasive then inevitably this begs an obvious question - why?