This isn’t just another political post, it’s bigger than that. Unfortunately, things that used to be apolitical have suddenly become matters of party allegiance. Bear with me as I wade through the morass in order to make a greater point.
It doesn’t require much imagination to see our political environment has become poisonous. It’s not the vigor with which we debate today, passion was present, within people of all stripes, in the room where the Constitution was drafted. Passion is good.
What has changed is the blatant willingness to jettison actual facts when they challenge our personal narratives.
Our species is successful because we are self-aware. I’ll repeat that so it’s not lost. We are here because we understand the concept of ‘I.’ It’s called ego, or consciousness. And it’s through that understanding that we were able to see others as conscious ‘I’ beings as well. That revelation paved the way to the key to our success: ‘we.’
If pure physical strength, speed, or endurance were the only determining factors in the success of a species, we’d be way down the food chain. On the early savannas of Africa, those attributes were the only gauges of a species’ ability to thrive.
But then humans appeared, and understood ‘we.’ Our success was not a product of speed or strength, but cunning. We realized we could do more as a group than any one person could do alone. Socialization was, and is, the key to our success. It lead to language, and language opened a whole new world. Crowd-sourcing, group projects, teamwork. And empathy.
Now, social media - the ability to pseudo-socialize - is tearing us apart. The division between fingers on the keys of a computer and the eyes on the other end emboldens us to say things we would never say in a civilized conversation. It removes the bother of witnessing the effect of those words.
It also allows us, in our privacy and isolation, to slowly be infiltrated by messages that, in a group setting, could be immediately challenged and tested. It allows us to buy into ideas that appeal to our ugliest sides, under cover of anonymity, and relay them to other anonymous people, without the anchor of conscience. Soon, even friends seem to lack faces.
We are no longer ‘we.’ And we eventually stop being able to see shades of grey. In a virtual reality world of graphic perfection, high definition, slow motion, we have ironically become very monochrome. Our own identity is all that matters to us, and we work hard to control it. We override graphic perfection with photo filters.
These effects, this isolation, have been disastrous for the human species. If I had to predict the cause of our eventual demise, I would point to technology. It opens up superhighways of information, but also allows us to reduce them to tiny side streets through filters. While we’re highly intelligent, we’ve slowly stripped away our own ability to see past the ego, the ‘I.’ Our isolation removes the value of collective data, and the ability to foresee trends. In this new world, we’re encouraged to associate only with like-minded people. We’re exposed only to information an algorithm has seen fit to feed us, reductio ad absurdum. Global is now tribal, and we are each an avatar.
What a shame, because facts and truth exist, and they are real. We need ‘we.’ As long as we refuse to see beyond the facade that’s been constructed for us - or we’ve constructed ourselves - we have no space for truth.
Welcome to Bizarro World.
