Most of us on social media saw it, the video of an elephant helping a tiger cross a river in what was purported to be the Kruger National Park.
The first dead giveaway, for most, would have been the fact that we have no tigers at the park – the species not being indigenous to Africa but Asia.
But to many others, telling one big cat from the other is a struggle even when one has spots and the other has stripes.
Hence that famous debate between Nelson Mandela and Mac Maharaj on Robben Island about whether tigers were indigenous to our continent. Madiba genuinely believed that “ingwe”, the Nguni word for leopard, also meant tiger. The Struggle icon was obviously wrong.
Back to the video, which made rounds as a massive flood devastated parts of Limpopo, including the Kruger National Park, it shows the elephant rescuing the wild cat and carrying it on its back until they reach the banks of the overflowing river on the other side.
The accompanying message is uplifting: “Irrespective of how good or bad you are, in life we need each other. Here is what the flood at Kruger national park has proven to us”.
Uplifting, positive but still untrue. The video is Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated and is as good as any other work of fiction on Netflix or one of those Donald Trump-cheering television networks in the US.
In a world increasingly dominated by AI, it is increasingly becoming difficult to tell reality from fiction. One now has to double-check, or triple-check, a video footage before believing its contents. They used to say a single picture can tell a story of a thousand words. Well, these days, that story can prove to be absolutely fictitious.
However, the problem is not just AI and the general advances in modern technology that make the line between reality and fiction blurred. Fundamentally, it is that almost all the institutions that we previously took for granted as credible have, in recent years, given us reasons to doubt.
Whereas in the past, for instances, we would give offerings at church every weekend with the firm belief that what we donated would go to good causes, these days we are compelled to pray with one eye open – hawkishly watching that the reverend doesn’t steal from the congregants.
In politics, the problem is worse in that we are no longer surprised by a corruption scandal, but by a politician who stays long in the game without a whiff of wrongdoing. He must be “protected” by “powerful forces”, we reason in our little gossiping cliques. Because everyone must be doing something wicked.
This atmosphere of mistrust is made even worse, in the South African context, by the phenomenon of running the country through commissions and other independent inquiries whose focus is usually what happened in the past.
Suddenly, it is not just the future that is uncertain but – as someone eloquently put it once – the past becomes unpredictable.
Those we hailed as national heroes just yesterday are today being burned at the stake just because yesterday’s villains has seen a gap in the formation of yet another commission of inquiry to recast themselves as the real victim of yesterday’s crime.
Suddenly, it matters not that a police chief was found guilty of aiding and abating a drug syndicate by a court of law, as long as we can demonstrate that his original accusers had ulterior motives.
Investigative journalists we’ve all along believed to be interested in nothing but uncovering the truth, no matter how unpalatable, are suddenly cast as mere pawns in the game of power politics – working for this or that faction – even though concrete evidence proving all of that is seldom presented.
The public is left none-the-wiser as to where the truth lies. Hence the growing mistrust of all things authority and mainstream. Joe Public is left being played by everyone.
Can democracy survive and strive in this kind of environment?
It seems to me that part of the reason we are seeing so many potential voters checkout of the electoral system generations of us fought so hard for is because they have lost all faith in the institutions that are supposed to make the democratic system work.
People don’t go to mass rallies or listen to public addresses by the head of state, cabinet ministers or opposition leaders because they believe that all they do is to lie to them.
But because nature allows for no vacuum, instead of elected representatives and those other structures that are supposed to keep the elected in check, the disgruntled turn their hopes on “benevolent dictators” and other proponents of anti-democratic means of governance as quick-fix solutions.
And, in a world where it is becoming harder to tell fiction from reality, the disgruntled start to doubt that that past was bad at all.
