I’ve been an ideologue at times. I’m sure I still am in certain ways, in ways I don’t even notice. Perhaps we all are. Still, I find ideology exhausting and uninteresting. I rarely enjoy talking to people about meaningful issues when I can predict their beliefs. For this reason and others, I’m frequently saddened that our current environment has made so many of my peers so closed-minded. Of course, it wouldn’t be right for me to end this post without blaming social media, and true to form, I do believe the filter bubbles of social media play no small part in this phenomenon.
When we talk to others one-on-one, especially about difficult topics, we have a responsibility to ensure that our message is heard. However, if it becomes clear that the message won't be heard, because the listener isn't genuinely curious and open-minded, we owe it to the listener and to ourselves to move on. This fact seems obvious, yet we seem to continually forget it.
I think of science as a verb, a process for discovering what's true, rather than a body of knowledge. Some people might say it's a process for discovering what's not true; that might be more accurate. In either case, when I run into people who distrust science, I wonder if they see it the same way.
I support the One Click Safer proposal for safeguarding social media. The concept is simple: instead of allowing users to reshare content indefinitely, social media platforms should remove the share button once a piece of content is two hops from its original source. If people three degrees from the author continue to find the content valuable, they would need to use copy and paste to share it further. In fact, I would go even further and propose that social media platforms remove the share button altogether; it's a simpler proposal that would be easier to explain.
In either case, these ideas make eminent sense to me. Sharing is a kind of chain reaction, and sharing on social media is completely uncontrolled at the moment. Physicists have a term for uncontrolled chain reactions: explosions. Yes, social media is dropping bombs on society daily, bombs of misinformation, lies, hatred, and outrage. Like the control rods of nuclear reactors, which slow fission enough to prevent meltdowns so that useful energy can be harvested, social media needs digital control rods, so that we can harness the power of information without destroying ourselves.
We need to do away with the myth that cults are simply religions that are new, strange, or misunderstood.
Unitarian Universalism is very new, having formed in 1961. Few people really understand the group and it is unusual in its acceptance of diverse beliefs. Still, I don't think it's especially dangerous, destructive, or controlling at this time.
Cults punish disobedience. They demonize doubt. They rip families apart, attack critics, and teach that critical thinking is a trap. They convince their adherents that the world is out to get them and they demand that authority is never questioned. Cults treat dissent like a virus, hastily exiling nonconformists and freethinkers before their views can spread. They treat their doctrine as perfect and their people as disposable. (Of course, their doctrine can become more perfect over time.)
Focusing on beliefs misses the point. All religious groups espouse beliefs which others find strange, but not all religious groups behave this way.
Cults destroy lives. When we fail to label them properly, we give cover to that destruction.
I'm struck by this point made by Josh Faga in his article Starving for Wisdom:
It used to be the case that we had to make up our mind about something. But, the advent of modern mediums has been so successful at packaging intellectual positions into digestible vitamins that they have essentially “made up our minds” for us.
We don't make up our minds at all. Instead, we are presented a pre-packaged intellectual position that the medium we consume it over conveniently places into our minds for us; a process not too dissimilar from placing a CD into a CD player. Then, also not too dissimilar from a CD player, when in the appropriate situations, we are conditioned to push a button and “play back” the opinion that was burned on the CD.
To complete the feedback loop, whenever we 'play the songs' on our CD players, we are rewarded by those that have the same CD. We regurgitate the opinions and information we consume to the group of people that have also consumed it and receive our reward for having successfully consumed and spit back what we have 'learned'. This process is at the bottom of our ideologically possessed and polarized political landscape. We are educating, organizing, and rewarding ourselves for simply putting a CD in a CD player and pressing play.
Social media is a confirmation bias machine. Facebook, for instance, is a great place to hear what we already believe. It's a terrible place to learn from the other and confront the weaknesses of our own arguments.
Is it any surprise, then, that political extremism, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience are flourishing?