Perspective

I think everyone, of every political persuasion – or of no persuasion – can agree that events in the USA have been troubling of late. A few months ago, I predicted that this period in American history would be one of the "most tumultuous" we'd seen recently.  Unlike most of my predictions, this one are turned out to be true, although not quite in the way I expected.

At times like this it can be useful to step back, take a breath, and try to look at the bigger picture. Here are a few aspects of that big picture:

 1. It's a commonplace observation that everything seems to be going crazy right now. I heard it just tonight from the cashier at the local Walgreen's. I have no idea of his political affiliation. I don't think it matters. Most people, right or left, feel this way. What could account for it?

I have a theory, borrowed from The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain. It’s kind of a pseudo-scientific book in many respects, overbroad in its historical reach, but its basic thesis is interesting. Shlain contends that every time there’s a major innovation in communication, society is destabilized and goes kind of insane for a while.

Shlain points to the development of the printing press, which led directly to the Protestant Reformation and all the chaos and war that went with it. Then there was commercial radio, which facilitated the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. There are other examples, going all the way back to the development of the written word and attendant left brain dominance, which arguably upset a more harmonious balance between the two hemispheres of the brain.

Now we have the Internet, and particularly social media (not covered, as far as I recall, in the book). Social media have obtained a presence in our lives that’s wildly out of proportion to their actual value, which, to be frank, is pretty minimal. They encourage division; the loudest and most extreme voices get the most attention, while people who hide behind screen names insult each other recklessly. They stoke hatred, mistrust, and fear. They deepen division and  and encourage polarization. They make anyone who disagrees into "the enemy." And yet people feel helplessly dependent on  social media, as if unable to get along without them.

Observe the panic, even hysteria, over the recent deplatforming of the alternative messaging service Parler. People are distraught at the loss of this outlet. And yet, as recently as five or ten years ago, that type of service wouldn't even have existed, and people survived perfectly well without it. In fact, I would bet that most people can survive very well without Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and even Google.

(This is not to say that the deplatforming of Parler was legitimate or even legal. The excuses given by Google, Apple, and Amazon strike me as patently phony, given the prevalence of violent rhetoric on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, which has not resulted in similar remedies. Parler is now suing Amazon for antitrust violations.)

Eventually we will probably find a way to integrate social media into our lives without the attendant downside. But it could take a while ... and in the meantime there will be more chaos.

2. Nevertheless, there is hope. Tim Berners-Lee, the man cited as the "inventor of the Internet" (more accurately, the inventor of the World Wide Web), is launching a whole new platform that may augment or even supplant the Big Tech-dominated Internet we have come to know.

Berners-Lee is unimpressed with the highly commercialized web and its appropriation of users' private information for corporate gain. He has apparently come up with a way around it. Given his track record, I wouldn't bet against him.

This type of entrepreneurial innovation is our best defense against the oligarchies that seek to crack down on free speech and maintain their monopolies at any cost. I think in the long run it will be successful. Modern societies are so pluralistic and diverse, it is almost impossible to impose uniform authoritarian top-down rules and enforce them effectively. It may work in China, which has no history of individualism or individual rights, but I don't think it will fare as well in the Western world.

3. It's necessary to guard against extremist thinking, which is encouraged by so many Internet sites, whether social media, blogs, or news aggregation sites. I'm not excluding this blog from the list. My blog, like a diary, is essentially a real-time record of my responses to things I've read and thought about, and no doubt I'm just as prone to overreaction and emotional reasoning as anybody else (or even more so). I was shocked when I woke up on the morning of November 4 and discovered that Trump's commanding lead had disappeared overnight, owing to very questionable ballot dumps. I continue to believe there was a lot of funny business going on, although I think Trump and his legal team did not handle the problem well.

In any event, we all need to be on guard against reacting viscerally to online headlines that are intended only to serve as clickbait. For instance, when I go to the right wing site Townhall.com, I find these headlines among the opinion pieces:

 The Lib-Fascist Purge

 The Progressive Purge Begins

 The Conservative Purge Won't Stop with Big Tech

 The US Might Soon Be Irretrievable

Townhall is a pretty far-right side, though by no means the farthest to the right. If you were to read its articles exclusively, you would probably conclude that we are in the midst of something equivalent to the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China or the killing fields of Cambodia. And yet this is a huge exaggeration. I do think Big Tech is drunk on its own real or imagined power and engaged in illegal cartel-like activity in suppressing upstart competitors, but it is not the end of democracy, capitalism, or the world.

Here is another example, from the right-wing site Ace of Spades:

Good morning, kids. Another new week in Year Zero. By the calendar on the wall, we're nine days away from the abyss, although between now and noon on Wednesday the 20th, things might happen that make even the most implausible plot points in overwrought Hollywood political potboilers look tame by comparison. Right now, I feel a bit like fellow Brooklyn native Irving Strobing. Strobing served in the US Army as a radio operator, and nearly 80 years ago, he tapped out the last messages from within the fortress cave on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines. 

The post quotes Strobing's desperate communiqués as Corregidor was overrun by the Japanese, which end with: ''I know how a mouse feels. Caught in a trap waiting for guys to come along and finish it up...'' It continues: 

When you read Strobing's words, the metaphors for today just reach out and grab you by the throat. While Strobing and thousands more Americans and Filipinos would endure the savagery of the Bataan Death March and then over three years of unimaginable suffering at the hands of the Japanese, liberation would ultimately come, and at a terrible cost. But in May of 1942, at that time and in that place, the situation and the future were very much in doubt. Just as it is here and now in 2021, in a nation formerly known as the United States of America.

So we are to believe, apparently, that our situation right now, on the eve of a new administration and a new Congress, is comparable to that of US troops who were being overrun by Japanese forces in World War II. Again, this is an exaggeration. And yet the power of social media – which includes blogs like Ace of Spades – can make it seem real.

I would  assume that similar hyperbole can be found on left-wing sites. It can certainly be found on Twitter and Facebook. This simply underscores the point I made in #1 above. Social media have had, and are still having, a deleterious effect on the national conversation. 

4. One thing that social media tend to encourage is the us-against-them, "devastating response" style of argument, which is extremely unproductive. sites like Twitchy, for instance, have made a living out of headlines celebrating a "devastating smackdown" of some liberal argument or another.

Example: I would say that the Democrats' intention to impeach President Trump only days before he leaves office is counterproductive, because it needlessly and vindictively deepens the divisions in the country, and only makes it more likely that we might devolve into some kind of civil war. Yet if I were to express this opinion on social media, I would probably be met with responses like:

Hey, we'll kick your ass in that civil war!

You racists lost the first Civil War, and you'll lose the second one!

It will be a short civil war once we bring out the nukes!

Although I've made up these responses, they're based on things I've actually read online. None of this is helpful at all. A much better response would be:

Nobody wants a civil war. There will be no winners. Let's all work together from this point forward and remember that we are all Americans.

And yet you will rarely read a response like that because social media do everything possible to discourage it. If you did try to find common ground in that way, you would be "ratioed," which, as I understand it, means that you would get more negative comments than retweets.

In short, it would be better for people to find ways to come together, find common ground, accept compromise, and heed the "better angels of their nature." Social media, unfortunately, do not encourage any of this. If you respond in that way, you'll be mocked, ostracized, and marginalized. Social media only respect people who fight back by swinging a punch – even a wild punch. 

When this blog was new, USENET was still a big thing. It was the equivalent, I guess, of Twitter and Facebook now. I'm not going to go back and check, but I think I wrote a piece called "USENET Is Hell," saying that USENET allowed people to come together who have nothing in common with each other, don't respect each other, have no reason to be polite or even civil, and engage in discourse that degenerates inevitably into crude oneupmanship.  

This turned out to be true, not so much about USENET, which is long gone, but about its successors. And I meant that it is literally Hell, in the sense that the higher planes of the postmortem experience are said to consist of like-minded souls of roughly equal levels of evolution, while the lower (hellish) planes consist of people who simply cannot get along. The "hells" (Swedenborg's term), in other words, are very much like USENET or, for that matter, Twitter and Facebook, inasmuch as they bring together people – or souls – who are congenitally incapable of amity.

5.  Mention of the afterlife brings me to an entirely different subject. There's a new series on Netflix called Surviving Death, which deals with issues like near-death experiences,  past-life recall, and other evidence for postmortem survival. I haven't watched it yet, but I've heard good things about it. You might want to check it out. It's the kind of programming we should probably support.

6.  On a related note, I hear good things about Pixar's latest offering, Soul, which apparently delves into (or at least touches on) many afterlife-related issues. At the moment it's available only on the subscription streaming service Disney+.

7.  Finally, I received copies of my nonfiction book The Far Horizon today. White Crow Books did a very good job with it. From visiting White Crow's site, I gather that the book is now available for preorder; the official publication date is January 19. Expect me to promote it with tedious persistence in the coming weeks.

Comments

[Eric Newhill]

Great post, Michael. Much wisdom to it.

I listened to an interview with former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D- Hawaii) and she addresses the conflict and angst in our society quite well, with special insights from her time in DC. Worth a listen, IMO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3j3RSxMSEg&fbclid=IwAR1OwG9dUoRHEvQanjyv0rfmMckLu-YuqIHCr1CrAcGAhqaCIgWpT1JYiyU

Too bad she didn't talk like that on the campaign trail. I would have had to have given her serious consideration over Trump.

I think a lot of social media users have a developed some form of PTSD. Recently I was posting some facts about healthcare access in the US. A forum member was upset over the "broken system" and claimed to be buried under $300,000 of healthcare debt. I very factually outlined how most people obtain coverage via their employer group, but for those that do not, there is Medicaid, the ACA and Medicare for seniors, how all of that works, etc. - that there is no good reason for anyone to not be covered except lack of information.

I had clearly stated my background to lend credence to what I had to say; masters degree in economics with a healthcare delivery focus, 20 years experience in healthcare insurance business analytics and, for the past 5 years, senior manager for a Fortune 100 company's ACA products within the wider government products division. I was just trying to be helpful because I know the market place can be confusing.

Within minutes people were replying that the system is "crap" and that I have "no idea" what I'm talking about. One guy said he knew more about the topic than I do because he had had a frustrating hour long conversation with an insurance broker when he was trying to purchase coverage. Some comments contained all caps sections with extra exclamation points.

I thought some people might have sincere questions and that I'd follow-up on them, but when I saw those crazy responses I went into instant anger mode. Words like "idiot!" flooded my mind. Images of punching an idiot in the nose danced gleefully through my inner vision. I had to stop and take a deep breath and decide whether or not I wanted to respond. Poison was dripping from my fingers as I reached out for the key board. Then I decided to be the better man and just drop it. If I had had a drink or two, I probably would have let fly and merely portrayed myself as an intolerant jerk as I have done many times on the internet - which is totally contrary to how I am in person/in real life. The internet is indeed a mad making uncivil place.

Looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of your book. Congrats on it's successful completion!

[Michael Prescott]

I like Tulsi quite a lot. She seems to be staking out a centrist position, perhaps in the expectation that extremism on both sides will wear out its welcome.

[Matt Rouge]

Cover looks good, Michael!

I haven't read the Alphabet book, but how does he deal with the issue of TV? TV broadcasting began in earnest in the US in 1948, and the decade-plus that followed was one of the most socially cohesive in the nation's history. Further, TV, at least in its early days seemed to be well-loved and not at the center of much or any conflict (i.e., not only was society cohesive but TV itself was not divisive).

In terms of extremism on left-leaning sites, I am a fan of dailykos.com in terms of its news stories and political perspective, but I don't participate in the comments because I don't like their tone and vibe. It's not nearly as bad as a left-wing Breitbart, but it's not good. And yes, you will find plenty of conspiracy-type thinking in the comments.

[Michael Prescott]

Matt, I read the book years ago, and I don’t seem to have it anymore, so I can’t recall how it addressed TV. I think, though, that TV played a pretty big role in the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, both of which were certainly disruptive and destabilizing to the status quo (not all disruption is bad). Maybe if TV had been widely available at the time of the Korean War, there would have been mass protests against that conflict. I’m old enough to remember many serious debates about the influence of TV on society, a very controversial issue in the 1960s and '70s.

I don’t read Breitbart, which is too far to the right for me. It’s impossible to find an impartial news source anymore, so I gravitate toward sites that are right-of-center but not (IMO) out of control. Well, actually I think the Ace of Spades site *is* out of control, but I like some of the humor, so I still look in on it. And sometimes I look at American Thinker, a pro-Trump site on steroids, just to see what the most extreme Trump bitter-enders are saying.

[Eric Newhill]

I read somewhere, I think it was related to Bernays (or may have been written directly by Bernays) that TV changed everything. The visual image started to become more important than the message. The medium is the message (or massage, as it is sometimes stated)

Everyone should read Bernays - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays -

Most of what you think and feel about politics and societal issues has been put into your head by methods developed Bernays.

[Saj Patel]

I often half-joke that social media is our Great Filter, that it will be what makes us one more species that fails to take to the stars.

But I think the root of this the need for self-affirmation beyond one's self. Politics used to be something you could discuss with your neighbor but has become a kind of Manichean brand identity. Physicalists tell us people are things, and corporations naturally lap this up and find new ways to incubate and then exploit insecurities.

It makes me think of something Colin Wilson said about parapsychology and why it matters ->

"Now it should be clear why I think that ‘the paranormal’ is of such immense importance. Here is one field that is untinged by contemporary pessimism. The clear message that emerges is that man possesses powers of which he is normally unaware.

As Richard Church watched the gardener wielding the axe, and noticed that the sound came after the blow, he says that he experienced a marvellous sense of freedom. His enemy so far had been ‘the drag of the earth’. Now he realised that he had been overestimating the enemy. It was at that moment that he made an instinctive effort and rose from the ground and glided about the room.

When man can clearly recognize the existence of these powers, and incorporate that recognition into his everyday awareness—so that he is no longer subject to a permanent ‘leakage’ of vitality—then he will suddenly have become a totally different kind of creature."

[David Chilstrom]

Congrats on the book release. Come Jan 19, one of the cha-chings you hear will be coming from my way. And thanks to Eric for mentioning Tulsi Gabbard again. She's awesome.

[richard rogers]

Schlain's book, one of my favorites, is centered on the shift from Goddess worship to God worship and how language abetted that movement. He does not address present day social media or the Internet. The oppression of females throughout history via language is a major theme.
Vows of silence are one way of counteracting the power of words and their implicit bias. The cliché, 'Those who know, don't talk and those who talk don't know.' comes to mind.

Your site is a breath of fresh air nowadays and a daily read for me.

Cheers,

richard

[Michael Prescott]

Thanks, Richard. Yes, I believe Shlain's book came out before social media had really taken off.

I remember that he attributed the witch-burning hysteria in Europe and America to the influence of increasing literacy rates. The idea is that literacy leads to left-brain dominance, which encourages judgmentalism, absolutism, and even misogyny.

It’s one of those books, like Julian Jaynes's "Origin of Consciousness ...", that I think contain a kernel of truth despite being carried a bit too far.

[Saj Patel]

Came across a good Sutra that shows where politicians, Big Tech, and corporate media lead us - problems that extend beyond this life ->

"Which is greater, the tears you have shed while transmigrating across lives & wandering this long, long time — crying & weeping from being joined with what is displeasing, being separated from what is pleasing — or the water in the four great oceans? Which is greater, the blood you have shed from having your heads cut off while transmigrating & wandering this long, long time, or the water in the four great oceans?

From an in-construable beginning comes lifetimes of transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating and wandering on. Just as a stick thrown up in the air lands sometimes on its base, sometimes on its side, sometimes on its tip; in the same way, beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, transmigrating and wandering on, sometimes go from this world to another world, sometimes come from another world to this.

Long have you thus experienced suffering, experienced pain, experienced loss, swelling the cemeteries — enough to become disenchanted with all fabrications, enough to become dispassionate, enough to be seek Liberation."
-Siddhārtha Gautama