March 19, 2012

• Kony 2012, Jason Russell, and the Perils of Personalization

  I'm going to assume you already know about KONY 2012, and instead talk about Jason Russell's arrest over the weekend for essentially making a spectacle of himself in public. The co-founder of Invisible Children, who helped create the massively viewed video, unfortunately brought a lot of embarrassment upon himself and his family. But what surprises me is how, whenever a founder or creator has an embarrassing moment, people try to make value judgments about the cause itself.

  Just because the founder of one cause might have a beautiful family and well-spoken children does not mean that her cause is good. Just because the founder of another cause might later on in life do embarrassing or criminal acts does not mean that he was crazy when they founded the cause. We are caught in this personalization trap, too lazy to investigate the actual principles behind what people believe and advocate. We are more likely to believe things if the people promoting them are attractive or speak well rather than investigate what those things actually mean.

  What does the Jason Russell breakdown actually mean? In an odd twist, it's actually a statement against personalization. Jason's wife, Danica, is quoted as saying "We thought a few thousand people would see the film, but in less than a week, millions of people around the world saw it. While that attention was great for raising awareness about Joseph Kony, it also brought a lot of attention to Jason — and, because of how personal the film is, many of the attacks against it were also very personal, and Jason took them very hard.” Sadly, the personalization of the cause might have been the very thing that drove Jason to such irrational behavior. I would like to live in a world where ideas are bigger than details about the people who first propose them, but that world is denied us for the time being (if it ever existed).

  • 2:11 pm
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