The #nomakeup Selfie: Why Learning is Important

New contributor Meryon Roderick examines the recent #nomakeup selfie trend and all the stigma that has been attached to it.

The most positive news story in recent months has to be the meteoric rise of the #nomakeup selfie. For everyone who has been living under a rock for the last few weeks, the no makeup selfie is a viral social media trend involving women posting pictures of themselves with (you guessed it) no makeup on, whilst simultaneously donating to cancer research.

The thing that interests me the most about the whole thing isn’t how it exhibits the awesome power of social media, or seeing how a lot of my female friends look without their faces on. What I find the most fascinating (in my pub-philosopher kind of way) is what it reveals about how people think. Whenever a trend like this takes root in the national psyche, battle lines are inevitably drawn and the first conflict that emerged was between those who derided the craze as self-centred and vain, and those who thought it was a pure and beautiful thing. Discussion of this battle, which continues to rage on across the blogosphere, is for another time. This article is about the second wave of clashes. Yes, don’t worry, I am getting to my point.

Just as the conflict seemed to be ebbing, a fresh set of strongly worded disagreements spread across my newsfeed regarding a much larger topic and often sparked, I noticed, by the same picture of a girl with tape on her face.  The message written on the tape reads “Be aware, they know the cure. Cancer is a 95.5 Billion dollar industry. You don’t really believe they’d want to stop that cash flow do you? Wake up.” Some of you will respond to that message with the same reaction as me. Disgust. Others among you may feel differently. Perhaps you think this girl has a point. Well, I’m writing this article to tell this second category of people to shut the hell up.

This, finally, brings me to the point of this article: learning is very important. I don’t mean in the “stay in school kids, drugs are bad” kind of way or even in the “why you no doctor yet?” pushy parent kind of way. I mean that a willingness to assess facts, come to conclusions, and strive to know and understand more about the world around us is a large part of what makes us fundamentally human. This is not restricted to science, this article is also aimed at those of you who don’t understand the point in doing a Literature degree, or think investing in theatres is a waste of money (yes I mean you Cardiff Council).

I saw one of the best analogies to explain my point posted by a redditor called Gekko_the_Great whilst engaged in my daily procrastination session. I’ll try to explain it in brief: imagine you woke up in the wilderness with no idea how you got there. The first thing you’d do after shaking your confusion would be to set up shelter, make a fire, and find some food and water. Once you had your nice little set up going you essentially have 2 options. You can try to find your way back to society or you can stay exactly where you are until your resources run out. Considering you’re in the middle of nowhere, with no bearing on the nearest civilisation, both options carry a pretty huge chance of death. So what’s the difference? The distinction lies in the fact that with the first option you at least have a goal. You’re striving for something and if you fail at least you gave it your best shot. The second option leaves you simply existing in a similar way to bacteria or a beetle. This is why, in the vast majority of cases, people pick the first option, because needing to find something else is what makes us human.

“But how does this relate to the selfie thing?” You ask with a hint of exasperation. Well if you’d just stop butting in, I’ll explain. See, as I viewed the battles being waged by internet warriors on both sides I noticed something. People could roughly be divided into those who bothered to learn the science and economics behind cancer and those who didn’t.

Everyone likes to feel clever and like they know something everyone else doesn’t. Being smug jackasses is another important part of what makes us human. The difference lies in your approach. Me, and everyone else who actually bothered to look up some facts, form one group who have resigned ourselves to reaching the top of the intellectual pile the hard way – by consuming as much information as we can from as many sources as possible until one day, just maybe, we might think a thought that no one has ever thunk before. The majority of us will sadly never get there. Once again, this doesn’t just mean science. This applies to anything from writing a book to composing a song to creating a new obscenity on a wall with spray paint. I’d be willing to go out on a limb and say that everyone strives for originality. The other group have taken a shortcut and lost a lot in the process. Rather than bothering to consume information or seek out new facts, they content themselves with an inner gut feeling that all received knowledge up this point is wrong either through ineptitude or, more commonly, as part of some vast, evil government plot.

I will now quickly dismantle Tape Girl’s argument with some things I found out with quick google searches. I’m not sure where the”95.5 billion dollar industry” bit came from, but I can tell you that according to BUPA, the cost of cancer treatment to the UK is predicted to rise to £15.3 billion by 2021. Do you not think even a government completely unconcerned with human suffering would view a cure for cancer as a good thing, in that it would free up about half of the money that the UK currently wants to spend on defence? If your problem is with the drug companies then I took a look at a report by the Wall Street Journal about the profits of Eli Lilly (who you may recognise as one of the most successful drug companies in the world and not some dude who lives in his mother’s basement). Turns out a whole load of their patents are expiring which means everyone can now make the drugs that they used to have trademarked and they’re set to lose a crapload (technical term) of money because of it. There lies the flaw in the idea that the drug companies are trying to slow progress on cancer treatment. The longer they go without developing new and more effective drugs and treatments, the more of their old treatments become public property, and the more money they lose. Don’t you think someone in that situation might want to start marketing the silver bullet of a CURE FOR FREAKING CANCER more or less right away?

You could say that ultimately it doesn’t matter. Does one douchebag working at a coffee shop who believes acupuncture can cure cancer really matter? Well yes, because this disagreement isn’t restricted to the internet. The first quarter of 2013 saw 948 reported cases of mumps in the UK which was strongly linked to a reduction in MMR vaccination. Why would parents stop vaccinating their kids? Because the Daily Mail published an article stating that the MMR vaccine causes autism, based on some very dodgy science done by Dr Andrew Wakefield (who has since been struck off by the British Medical Association for his part in the scare). Turns out the research he did into MMR was funded by a company that would have gained hugely from the NHS dropping the vaccine. Funny that. Regardless of all this, thousands of people still decided not to get their children vaccinated because, much like the cancer research bashers, they decided that it made them feel much cleverer to believe some advice based on poorly conducted research, printed in a far right newspaper criticising the actions of a left wing government without considering what the political or economic motivation might be for that article.

This is the real danger of not bothering to learn. Anyone with a shred of common sense who bothered to dig any deeper than just reading the article found the facts were non-existent and promptly vaccinated their kids. Now this means that hundreds of children across the country are suffering because of a stupid choice their parents made. It gets worse. Some children can’t get vaccinations because their immune systems don’t work, and so they rely on the rest of us to prevent diseases from spreading by being immune to them. If you don’t vaccinate your child you’re endangering any number of vulnerable people across the country and that’s the problem with not bothering to learn.

Did you see how easy it was for me to completely destroy that argument a few paragraphs back? That would have required quite a bit of research on my part only 15 years or so ago. Nowadays you can find anything you want in seconds and all you have to do is make sure the information comes from a reliable source. This brings me neatly to the end of my rant and to one of my favourite quotes of all time, from the author Donny Miller: “In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.” Never has the truth of that statement been clearer to me than yesterday when I saw a grown man state that homeopathy can cure cancer. I’m begging you people, before you form an opinion on something, read a fucking book.

 

To donate to cancer research text BEAT to 70007 or check their website.

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