The Insubstantial Internet

Too often, we mistake having a lot of information for being smart. From a young age, we’re taught that our own opinions aren’t good enough and need to be fixed, whether by society, our parents, our schools, or our religion. Our own voice and our own intelligence, built on common sense and thinking things through, get brushed aside. So does our natural curiosity, the kind that makes us try things, learn from mistakes, and see the world with fresh eyes like a beginner. Instead, education is treated as memorizing facts that keep things the way they are. It rarely encourages the kind of independent thinking that would question how things are done, and help us grow and improve over time.

If you sit quietly, in the silence of meditation, you may find that your own ability to think clearly is far deeper and sharper than most of what you’ll find online. Sadly, people have also been misled about why so much content is made in the first place. It’s a hard truth, but a truth all the same: information, especially on social media and TV, is often used by powerful people to mislead the public. They bury us in half-truths and outright lies, or keep us entertained until we’re too lazy to notice, and we end up none the wiser. Much of it is close to propaganda, almost as rigid as the beliefs of extreme religious groups. Its goal isn’t to inform us. Its goal is to stir up our worst feelings: fear, resentment, greed, and worst of all, judgment.

Again and again, we mistake information for intelligence. The average person is hit with so much information that they can no longer think clearly or reach their own conclusions. Is it any wonder, then, that people form their opinions from TV commentators, so-called experts, and 30-second campaign ads?

But it always takes two to tango. People want others to think for them (that’s the media’s role) and to act for them (that’s the government’s role). To put it bluntly, it’s because, as individuals and as a society, we have chosen not to take full responsibility for our own actions. If we did, we would never treat sensational headlines online as the truth and base our opinions on them. I would go further: if we keep dodging our duty to think for ourselves, and choose blind belief instead, then we are no different from extremists around the world, only less extreme.

If I think for myself, reach my own conclusions, and act on them, then I have to take responsibility for what happens. I might make a mistake, and I might be afraid of being blamed. And if I’m afraid of making mistakes, doesn’t it make sense to avoid thinking for myself? That way I never have to decide anything. I can just borrow someone else’s beliefs, or join a ready-made belief system. Then, if things go wrong, it isn’t my fault. It’s the fault of whoever or whatever I believed in.

As a society, we often don’t want to make our own decisions and risk being wrong. So very few people really ask questions. And of those who do, very few have the courage to act on what they find. The more we choose not to act, the more our whole society slides toward being cowards together.

Trump’s way of speaking, and the purpose behind it, is to get his followers to believe his promises without question. As a result, his supporters are walking blindfolded, with no idea whether they’re heading toward solid ground or quicksand. Picture lots of people who don’t want to take real responsibility for what they believe and do, all with social media to shout their opinions. We can’t expect real intelligence to come out of that. Instead, they just repeat a set of beliefs someone else sold them, which they’ve taken on as their own.

In many ways, most people hardly think for themselves at all. It’s easier to accept an existing set of beliefs without question. Those beliefs sink in so deeply that people act as if they were running on software, like programmed robots. You could call it a kind of group mind, and it sits at the very heart of social media. As a result, we have become a community of cowards.

Original thinking and real intelligence need simplicity and the courage to think for yourself. The point of what I’m writing is to light the spark of intelligence that’s sleeping inside each of us, so we can think for ourselves without worrying about what others want us to think.

I have always admired the philosophers of ancient Greece for how clearly, intelligently, and fearlessly they thought. They had the courage to think for themselves and to boldly ignore the accepted rules of their time. That’s truly remarkable. It must have taken enormous courage to think so far outside the box they lived in. Athens was surrounded by warring states, including harsh, controlling ones like Sparta, which made it an unlikely place for the idea of democracy to be born. Yet several centuries before Christ, these thinkers laid the foundations of democracy. That’s a true wonder, since nothing like it had existed before.

In today’s world, we should try to be more like those Greek thinkers. We need to learn to think for ourselves, without fear, as we search for what’s true and what’s accurate. We need to use the intelligence we were born with to tell what matters from what doesn’t, and what’s true from what’s false, and then have the courage to act on what we believe. Thomas Paine might have called this ability common sense.

As individuals and as a society, we need to think things through for ourselves and reach our own conclusions, rather than accepting neatly packaged beliefs handed to us by society or posted on social media. If you haven’t started doing this yet, you’ll make mistakes along the way, and that can be uncomfortable. But like a muscle that gets stronger the more you use it, the ability to think clearly gets stronger the more you practice it.

It’s essential that we keep trying, making mistakes, and learning from them, so we reach our own conclusions and form beliefs with our own minds. And we must not confuse information with knowledge. Instead, we should think carefully about the information we take in, to see clearly whether it matters, and whether it’s true or false. If we do that, we can push back against the powerful few who try to flood us with lies, and we won’t become slaves to them. They may try to keep us quiet with entertainment, but we’ll see it for what it is: a distraction. As Shakespeare put it so well, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

We have to admit that while the Internet has become a kind of shared mind for humanity, it has also largely become a tool for the powerful few to spread lies and keep us afraid. We need to see how dangerous it is that this tool is being used against us on purpose. Still, I don’t put all the blame on the powerful. By refusing to think and reflect for ourselves, we have willingly become pawns in their game. We have chosen to stop using our minds because it’s easier. So we carry a large share of the responsibility for letting them control us, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Here is the hardest truth of all: it isn’t really the fault of the powerful that they silence and mislead us. It’s our fault for letting ourselves be silenced and misled.

Our choices have consequences. Suppose we let others quiet our voices, and simply adopt the ready-made opinions of online commentators and personalities. Then we shouldn’t be surprised to end up in a society where a powerful few take advantage of how easily we go along. The result is a world that is deeply unequal and unfair.