Ramble: On Bubbles and Intellectual Contagion

Nowadays, people are unwilling to discuss controversy. This, oddly enough, is an uncontroversial statement. Yet very few seem to ask why it is the case, and the few who do are either beaten back into submission like the proverbial nail, or are left adrift without any particular side to cling to, as every group or tribe has rejected them for not meeting unscrupulously rigorous standards of ideological purity.

Let me give an example: immigration. Some readers might shiver or hesitate to read on even at the mere mention of the word. It has become a firebrand by which fringe madmen have mobilized their armies of drones against people in the endless social media wars which plague the 21st century. Yet there must still be had a dialogue about immigration as a social and political topic.

I shall name two very simple arguments concerning immigration, one for and one against:

1. Immigration is a net positive to a country because many immigrants are hardworking individuals who come to countries such as the US or the UK to study at prestigious schools (Stanford, Oxbridge, Harvard, Yale, etc) and obtain degrees in fields which will net them a career and profit in their homelands. Plus, many immigrants who stay permanently in their new home end up contributing to the cultural and culinary diversity of their neighborhoods, and can even make it in show business. Plenty of famous entertainers in the US during the Golden Age of Radio and Hollywood--the Marx Brothers, Kirk Douglas, Eddie Cantor, Charlie Chaplin, etc--were either descendants of, among other groups, Jewish and Eastern European immigrants who settled in New York during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, or immigrants themselves. Ergo, immigration is something which should be encouraged.

2. Immigration is a drag on the social services of a nation, since many don't pay taxes which support the systems which they use the same way that normal citizens do. In the case of the United States, many undocumented or illegal immigrants enter through the rather porous border of the country's southwestern states and are often given jobs as domestics in upper-class households or as gardeners, agricultural laborers, and other menial tasks that many citizens won't touch (perhaps because some citizens consider themselves too good for such lower-class occupations.) This is a detriment to the native-born working class of a country, since they now must compete with illegal immigrants for wages which will not rise, as the illegal immigrants themselves provide employers and companies with a good incentive against raising wages (which would supposedly hurt the pocketbooks of megacorporations). Ergo, immigration should be restricted in order to give the working class more opportunity for employment, however menial, and force companies to raise wages, leading to a higher level of prosperity for those at the bottom.

As I see it, these two arguments are perfectly valid positions to hold, and do not qualify their bearers for any position of extremism. The first argument does not make he who holds it a raving, open-borders, socialist lunatic, and the second does not make he who holds it a racist, cryptofascist, ethnocentric lunatic.

Yet it seems to me that he who nowadays espouses the first argument will refuse to speak with he who espouses the second, and he who espouses the second argument will dare not interact or even breathe in the general direction of he who espouses the first. Both sides appear trapped, sealed away in their own intellectual bubbles, afraid of any criticism or opposing voices. To them, any opposition or deviance from what they consider Gospel is tantamount to an intellectual pathogen, a hitherto unencountered specimen of some awful plague, a portent of some unforeseen evil that threatens to wipe out everything in that bubble, hanging over like Damocles' famed blade.

What is the cause of this? I am no expert on human relations--I'm just a guy with a blog--but by virtue of living as a human for twenty-one years, I have seen enough of human nature to the degree that I consider myself qualified to make a judgment upon how people interact with each other. As such, these are purely my observations, and do not represent the views of any other person save myself. I make no appeals to hard scientific authority or to studies full of facts and figures. I am merely a man dabbling in some amateur speculative philosophy, making observations, asking questions, and trying to come up with an answer.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let me present the central idea of this blog post: namely, that in our 21st century world, the unprecedented luxury many of us take for granted has brought out the worst in us, revealing to the world the baser instincts of our inward natures which our ancestors strove to conceal in favor of pursuing and practicing virtues.

In short, the 21st century has made animals out of men.

Before I continue, I should say that I am not against the 21st century. In fact, I am quite grateful for the advancements in science and technology that have come over the last two centuries. We currently live in the most peaceful time on earth (not everyone is at war now), we've eliminated smallpox (a disease which once felled millions and deformed millions more), and more and more people in poorer nations are receiving some form of economic freedom and education which would have in previous eras been denied them. There's a considerable amount to be thankful for in our time.

However, alongside these great advancements have come those aforementioned luxuries, with the Circe-like power of transforming men into beasts (and sometimes animals into men, if the countless internet videos of cats acting all cutesy and genteel is anything to go by.) What do I mean by luxuries, exactly? The most prominent example would be social media.

Ah yes, social media! That dreaded Hydra of the Web, the many-headed serpent from whose gargantuan bonds and breath of toxic content no traveler returns the same as when he went forth. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr--these are the big ones, but even sites like YouTube, Twitch, as well as the uncountable amount of porno sites, count as some form of social media. People upload just about whatever they think will please the eye of the curious peruser and get his attention, in the hopes that he will not only like, share, and republish or repost the original content, but add his own comment on it as well. This is perhaps the best example of a luxury that makes men into animals that I can think of. There are others, to be sure, but social media so ubiquitous that it might as well be the only one.

Social media turns men into animals and brings out their baser natures by making posting into a game. Whose post can get the most likes in a set span of time? Which hashtag is being tweeted the most? How many angry comments or trolls can this or that post provoke? How many people will respond to a troll comment and esteem themselves the equivalent of Sir Percival for responding to a comment along the lines of, "lol ur gay kill urself faggot" or some similar glaring bait?

Etc...etc...and so it goes on, and on, and on, and on. In the words of Jonathan Swift,

"So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Thus every poet, in his kind,
Is bit by him that comes behind."

Not only is it a vicious cycle of flea-biting, but it's also a race to see which mischaracterization is the greatest and most Munchausen-esque of 'em all. Consider the two arguments I mentioned above. Now imagine them put through the ringer of the 24-hour news cycle, Facebook, the 280 character limit of Twitter, and see how they are boiled down by the other side until you arrive at something rather like this:

1. "You said suchandsuch, that means you're a racist/fascist/xenophobe/buzzword-of-the-hour and you're evil!"
2. "Oh yeah? Well you said yaddayaddayadda, that means you're a looney leftie/open borders/socialist whiner and you're the evil one!"
1. [addressing a mob of his followers] "Did you hear what he said?! Get him! Get him!"
2. [addressing a mob of his followers in turn] "Alright, he said all that about me, about us! Get him! Get him!"

I won't go on with this because it'd be silly, but it always devolves into verbal bloodshed, with neither side truly victorious but only thinking that they are. People say things, others misread or misinterpret them, and both sides go at it, tearing at each other's throats, hoping desperately that they hear their enemy shout "Uncle!" before they run out of energy and have to go back to living boring lives. 

This is the result of intellectual bubbles and social media. People are no longer confronted with an opposing viewpoint which they must deal with. People now can shut themselves away in online bubbles, seeing the opposition only through a heavy film, where the arguments and opposing concepts--those dreaded pathogens--are either presented as a scary but ultimately distant bogeyman, or just cast out entirely with no allowance for critical thinking.\

You may be asking, "What's your solution? You've presented a problem, now what's your solution?" 

I can't say that I have a solid, concrete solution outline with steps. I will say, though, that I think a good start would be to simply turn it off. Step away from the internet for a while. Go outside, read a book, cook a good meal, get some exercise, etc. Just keep away from the internet for a little while, and then come back when you've cooled off. It may be daunting at first, but going outside and talking to others while rejecting social media is something anyone can do, and something that everyone should do. I go without Twitter every once in a while for the span of a week. Do I miss stuff like juicy e-drama tidbits? Sure. But I ask myself whether these tidbits are of any real consequence, and most of them decidedly are not.

As a polite request from me, dear reader, please get off the internet for a little while. Go outside, read a book, write some poetry, paint, cook--anything else. Don't stay in the bubble 24/7. 

Pax vobiscum. :-)