Empathy
We need to find it, or perish.
Donald Trump isn’t the problem. Neither is Mitch McConnell, Bill Barr, or any of the corrupt conspirators who are lying to America and attempting to dismantle democracy and replace it with a banana republic and a dictator that can’t be removed. Although yes, these people are all bad, they are not the problem. They are a part of the problem.
Democrats are not the problem. While alt-right tuned Americans are walking around convinced that democrats are planning to turn us all into gay communist muslim drug addicts who live on social security, most people know this is not the case. Democrats are part of the problem.
What I learned from The Social Dilemma is that we have developed a digital addiction, as we are given more and more content that the AI learns we like, and as a result we have gradually developed a separate truth that envelopes us. For each of us, this ‘private truth’ will vary. But for liberal progressives as a group of people, vs alt-right as another, these two groups have developed two separate universes of truth to inhabit, and these two domes have almost no shared truth between them. The data privacy issues we loved to complain about are not scary. Facebook isn’t going to sell your data. But by knowing so much about you, FB is able to place you in front of exactly the right advertisers and content to deepen your digital addiction, feeding you little dopamine hits every time your friends like what you shared or a stranger shares your post and gives you credibility.
Then we go out into the analog world and we expect to function as normal human beings, but we can’t. A crack addict and a gambling addict are both dysfunctional humans — they continue to let themselves down because they obey their addictions instead of their plans and intentions. The addiction is stronger, even when someone has vowed to themselves that next time will be different. It isn’t.
As digital addicts, our symptoms are far more subtle. We don’t lose our teeth and we haven’t gambled the rent check away. We have some equally serious and debilitating symptoms but they aren’t evident to others, nor to us.
We have lost our empathy. We have replaced it with a sad and pathetic idea that everyone who disagrees with us is fundamentally evil. Our dopamine feed on social media has given us tiny doses of comfort and we have become dependent on the steady supply, while also reacting with horror and disbelief when someone’s social feed offers a hate message that directly opposes our beliefs. In the analog world, we have become incapable of dealing with this small difference — it causes us emotional trauma as though we were a two year old who is told he can’t have an ice cream. The dopamine hits we get from our social media feed is the direct cause of our inability to live with minor differences of opinion between us.
The rise of snowflakism is not a coincidence. Right wing media blames universities for spreading liberal nonsense disguised as knowledge. Similarly, the rise of the armed militia guys and the proud boys and myriad other white power groups filled with undereducated underachievers is fueled by exactly the same digital addiction, but by different sources and publishers. They operate in the same way.
There is no solution to this social disease except when we admit we have a disease, and collectively decide to do something about it. Like a crack addict, we cannot fix ourselves until we admit we are broken. Democrats walk around believing only uneducated right wingers fall for fake news. Alt-right media consumers similarly believe ‘liberals’ have been brainwashed into believing the Covid story is real, and that CO2 causes climate change. We have to admit that our minds have been bullied, bent, doped, and that our perception after this trauma has been damaged. We went into the ring with a supercomuter that uses AI to serve us our next dose of happy, and we were not in a fair fight. We had no chance. Here we are, after several rounds of losing the boxing match.
Empathy was our asset, our heartfelt warmth that allowed us to overrule a cheap emotion that wanted us to feel dislike or mistrust for a person not completely like ourselves. Empathy allowed us to forgive — and sometimes celebrate — differences. It’s the empathy that was depleted as we succumbed to our digital addiction, and the empathy that is no longer there when we try to cope in the analog world and are confronted with strange situations where not everyone agrees with us as they did in our social media bubble. We tuned into the thumbs-up people and we tuned out the thumbs-down people. We thought we had it figured out.
Now everyone hates everyone and the fabric of our society is shredded. Progressives can’t be in the room with centrist democrats, feeling betrayal is imminent because Bernie and Elizabeth were sneakily sidelined by a big money agenda that wants to preserve the center-right coalition that secretly just obeys the republicans. Or so they learned in their alternative reality at MoveOn, OccupyDemocrats, etc. They hate the police because most officers also belong to the KKK and this is clearly documented in their dopamine feed so it must be true. They hate white privilege because white people have white privilege and they don’t want to give it back. Everyone in their friends list agrees this is true. Other end of town, white working poor folk bristling when they see a #BLM protest because they know these people are funded by China and they want to bring communism to America. It’s true because Alex Jones has been reporting this for some time now. Identity politics serves no imaginable good to anyone. It build walls and feeds resentment, hate and fear into the walled-in spaces it created. There are no winners, only seething anger and a fragmented society. Your dopamine feed created that.
We have no chance unless we unplug our dope machines and walk out into the street (yes with masks on) and talk to real people, especially the ones we disagree with. Share a couple of beers and hotdogs and talk about what unites us, and crack some jokes about each other to desensitize our overly thin skins. Realize that America is actually a pretty amazing country, mostly because of the differences we have, and the stunning wealth of wisdom and experience we collectively have, if we can get along. If we can’t, we’ll crumble and soon America will look like Argentina — second world, semi-functioning, corrupt country where your dreams absolutely will not come true, because nothing works and everything is camouflaged and untrustworthy.
The disco era was the brightest, most wonderful cultural movement America has ever seen. Not the hippies. They were all white and middle class. They were spoiled children of the wealthiest middle class the world had ever seen, and they rebelled against it so they could grow tomatoes and smoke weed. The disco era united poor and rich, black and white, gay and straight, and it brought us all into its vortex of urban excitement and chase-your-dreams individualism white celebrating diversity and ignoring skin color, sexual orientation, religion and class.
We need a new disco era to melt the ice and remind us all we are very much more alike that we are different. When a boy walks up to a girl and says hello, it’s not #MeToo all over again, it a romantic moment that may lead immediately to “No thanks, go away” but it’s the oldest story humans know.
What do most of us want? Jobs — yes. Fair pay — yes. Safe in the streets — yes. Healthcare we can afford — yes. Education that doesn’t break the bank — yes. military strength at home and abroad — yes. Religious freedom — yes. Freedom of speech — yes. Government we can trust — yes. Police we can trust — yes. Any credible statistician can prove that 75% to 80% of Americans want all of the above.
We have been played. The MAGA hat guy over the road doesn’t actually hate black people and he doesn’t actually want to kill Guatemalan kids stuck at the border. He’s been conditioned by a powerful AI that fed him what it knew he likes, and here we are. His beliefs have been reshaped. The #Occupy woman with the No More Billionaires bumper sticker doesn’t actually want to strip all wealthy people of all they have. Her emotions dragged her to the dopamine dispenser and she got high on it. She hates much less than it would seem when you hear her speak.
