'I'm not dead yet, just in a state of rapid decay, who isn't?”
Charles Bukowski was referring to human frailty and our annoying propensity to die, and so far there isn’t a person in history who hasn’t, or won’t. I will do it, and so will you. Of course, using science, we are fighting tooth and nail against it. It’s in our DNA, and that of all animals on the planet.
Call it ironic, then, that we’re unwittingly killing ourselves. Not physically, per se, and not intentionally. No, we’re eroding the thing that earned us supremacy over the other beasts of the earth. We are dying a collective, social death. The very thing that gave us power - the human ‘collective’ - is slipping away.
I blame Blogger. There, I said it. An explanation is forthcoming.
In the winter of 1978, I lied about my age so I could enter the broadcast industry. I spent the following two-plus decades moving from “town to town, up and down the dial,” doing the thing I loved.
What’s not to love? I was given a platform to speak to the masses, and was paid to do it. I took the job seriously, placing an emphasis on accuracy, and making sure everything I did served the public interest. I wasn’t special, and what I did wasn’t novel. The trail had been blazed by honorable, notable people who set the standards by which we all operated.
Then, that huge podium that had been given to a select few of us began to erode. Actually that’s a bad metaphor, it was more like the ground rose to meet the podium.
A new platform, the blog, was born. By that time I was out of radio and didn’t have an outlet to express myself, so… cool! Suddenly there was once again a vehicle to get my thoughts to the masses.
Bummer that there was no longer anything special about reaching the masses. Via the blog, individuals everywhere also had their own podium and were able to express themselves. They could show off their writing talent. They could be funny. They could be interesting. They could be heard.
And that was the beginning of the end.
Once-bright lines of journalism were crossed, and then obliterated. There was no requirement for ethics or accuracy. It was the wild west all over again, and you didn’t need to possess any powers of prediction to see where it was going.
Fast-forward to today and the ironically-coined phenomenon of social media has further exacerbated our separation. It not only allows us to spread misinformation, but also to depict ourselves in only the most flattering light directly to a carefully-chosen list of friends. We can filter out more than just people, we can eliminate anything negative, and present a wholly inaccurate, self-curated facade, fomenting insecurity, envy, and FOMO.
All of this contributes to a poisonous social and political environment. We’ve gone from giant collectives, to millions of individuals, and now to distinct and toxic tribes.
I don’t mean to unduly glorify the term “collective,” we’ve always had our differences. Wars have been fought, debates have raged, blood has been spilled. The vigor with which we debate has always been present.
What has changed is a blatant willingness to jettison actual facts when they challenge our personal narratives. Social upheavals and wars of the past have been based mostly on philosophical differences, and those differences were real. They were based in fact and evidence. Today, facts are unnecessary trivialities.
It’s time to get a little meta. 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. On the surface that sounds counter to my point about the human collective, but it’s through our understanding of the ‘self’ that we are able to see others as conscious ‘I’ beings as well. See Aristotle and Descartes for elucidation.
In my opinion, the realization of ‘self’ made it possible to understand ‘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 led 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, to 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 gray. 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 for ourselves - we have no space for truth.
Here in 2015, we are living in Bizarro World.