Editor, I saw the public reception to my previous letter identifying Bill Dennis's behavioral patterns. While readers seem pleased, I am not, because 1) I do not care for praise or approval like Dennis does, and 2) much of the engagement re-diffused what was synthesized. Thanks for agreeing, everyone, but the point was not to […]
Editor,
I saw the public reception to my previous letter identifying Bill Dennis's behavioral patterns. While readers seem pleased, I am not, because 1) I do not care for praise or approval like Dennis does, and 2) much of the engagement re-diffused what was synthesized.
Thanks for agreeing, everyone, but the point was not to provide content for passive consumption or bias confirmation. It was to demonstrate that any citizen can identify and articulate observed patterns without relying on officials or thought leaders to translate reality for us. Forget Bill Dennis. Although he was the subject of my previous letter, the broader issue is building civic capacity when citizens treat synthesis as a service to consume rather than a skill to develop.
A reader response welcomed me to the "real world" of Sarnia politics, claiming these patterns have been obvious for years. They are correct, and I am relatively new to following our local politics, but their claim exposes a problem. If the patterns were genuinely obvious for years, wouldn’t Sarnians have engaged with them when they first appeared? Honestly, they likely did, albeit briefly, before attention shifted to the next issue.
For this historical lapse, we should not blame one another.
Today, however, we should use this hindsight to figure out what not to do. Now is not the time to wait or be distracted by whatever grabs our attention on our phones. If patterns are obvious to us, we have a responsibility to make them actionable to our peers rather than waiting years for them to catch up. Public passivity is equally destructive. When responses stop at agreement, mockery, or gossip, civic capacity erodes.
We mirror the platforms we use by rewarding "spot on" takes, circulating memes, and substituting gossip for real synthesis. However, civic engagement follows a different reward mechanism than this mode of instantaneous gratification. If we hyper-fixate on those systems, our shared sense-making collapses and the community grows dependent on the few individuals who continue to do the work. The alternative to distributed civic synthesis is not neutrality, but dependence. And dependence in a democracy is failure by design.
What I did was not hard. If you can observe behaviour and describe what you see, you already have the core skill required. One person spotting a pattern and sharing their insights can inspire ten others to add what they have noticed. Those observations compound. What feels overwhelming as individual burden becomes simple when treated as collaborative synthesis. The hard part is not the effort, but choosing to start.
My call to action is simple. Observe specific behaviours, note when they repeat, and share them publicly. A single clear observation, even a comment on a news article, can prompt others to add what they have seen. Patterns become visible through accumulation, not perfection. This is crowdsourced civic capacity.
True democracy requires many citizens capable of independent synthesis. When that capacity atrophies through passivity, what’s obvious becomes impossible. It is the people's job to synthesize.
Mitch Desjardin
