Has America Lost Its Mind?

Social media has had a bad week. Truth be told, its had a bad year. The entire past decade hasn’t been that great either, come to think of it. Sometimes it’s great. I’ll see a beautiful picture of someone’s new baby or their hilarious dog doing something adorable and it makes me smile. Other days I’ll come across some bad news about an old friend. I’ll send him a private message or pick up the phone and connect, a very good thing. But most days, social media is the place I go that convinces me that we Americans are losing our minds. What I see on Facebook—I gave up Twitter a year ago—is essentially the Balkanization of my country, the great herding of us into our exclusive enclaves of ethnic, religious and political identities. Once safely there, we feed on only the things that confirm our tribal beliefs. The process has made us dumber, meaner, and uglier.

A couple days ago a story appeared on my feed. There was a picture of dark menacing clouds gathering over the Capital building with the ominous headline...A Storm Is Brewing. The story had been reposted by a friend, who had reposted it from someone else, who had passed it along from a blog written by some other guy with 5000 followers who I had never heard of. The author, it turns out is a semi-obscure blogger, (I know a thing or two about obscure bloggers!), known for writing very conservative opinions for a group called Colorado Republicans. So, like any concerned citizen who learns that there is a storm brewing in my nation’s capital, I read the story. Wow.

According to the writer of the piece, who assures us right away in the very first sentence that he is not an alarmist, proceeds to tell us that there is a massive conspiracy cooking in the highest levels of Washington, the result of which will be violent civil war after the 2020 election, regardless of who wins!! Can you imagine how frightening the story might have been if this guy was an alarmist? Anyway, here’s the scoop: If Donald Trump wins, top officials of the Democratic Party are plotting violent insurrections to punish the citizenry for re-electing Trump. This violence will make the protests since George Floyd’s murder look like child’s play. To protect Americans from this violence, top officials of the Trump administration are drafting up Marshall Law edicts for the entire country. If, on the other hand, Joe Biden wins, equal violence will be unleashed in the streets of every American city—with the active support and assistance of Biden-Harris and the leadership of the Democrat party—to enact retribution against those who elected Trump in 2016. What evidence does the writer offer as proof of these allegations? We are assured that his information comes from a highly placed government official who shared this treasonous information with him personally. The reason he is so certain it is all true is because ordinarily, this friend of his hardly ever talks about what’s going on at his job. That’s it. His one source for this bombshell story is some anonymous guy he knows in some unnamed department of the government.

After reading this story, I rubbed my tired eyes with my fingers and pondered how we have arrived at this point. That so thinly sourced, illogically reasoned claptrap could possibly be believed by rational human beings is quite beyond my comprehension level. But, then I read through the comment section. The unanimous reaction of nearly all those bothering to offer an opinion of this piece was...This is so scary!! Well, of course it is! If it weren’t, you wouldn't be reading it, it never would have been reposted a hundred times. So, why was it reposted so many times, eventually finding its way onto my feed? Two words...confirmation bias. If the story sounds like something you think the other side capable of, then you are more likely to believe it, no matter how obscure the writer may be or how little evidence he offers to confirm his assertions.

After this depressing experience, I asked my wife a hypothetical question that went like this. “How different would you feel about the world right now if you hadn’t read anything on Facebook for the last twelve months?” Suppose our collective consciousness had not absorbed anything from social media. Would we be better off or worse off? My contention is that we would all be smarter, nicer, and better looking...and in much less need of therapy.