I am working on a set of thoughts based on an interview I recently heard featuring Bari Weiss’s experience at the New York Times, which is a highly articulate and controlled tour de force of how organisations can be distorted by dogmatic takeover (watch this space). But yesterday an explosive polemic from acclaimed Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie also forced the world to sit up and listen. Its subject is the rising tide of presumed entitlement, its attempted enforcement through social media, and its corrosive effect on personal and public life.
Adichie’s words speak from themselves. I would strongly urge everyone to read the entire entry, to take it on humbly as a truly important and worthwhile warning and lesson in life and, from tomorrow onwards, to look to carry themselves differently in personal interactions and discourse. I include myself in that. The world would immediately be a better place.
Adichie’s blog entry is at https://www.chimamanda.com/ and closes with these words:
“I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own.
The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness.
We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.”