Amerika

Our greatest medium of communication may be the place we can do anything but communicate.

There is a weird “internet syndrome” where people behave through a combination of constant self-expression, wish fulfillment pre-enactment, posing and grandstanding — as if somehow appearing to be something makes one actually that thing.

The problem is that this neurotic behavior obstructs all argument, all content sharing and all actual friendship, and replaces it with people jockeying for various degrees of Status and Control in an imaginary world.

It has one salient advantage, in that it allows them to be outspoken, in contrast to a physical world where fear of the consequences of what other people think about what you are doing, for most of us, will limit what we are willing to say and do. We depend on making others like us for our careers, relationships, friends and even services.

Yet the internet syndrome corrupts even outspokenness. People quickly adopt “extreme” views as a way of distinguishing themselves and appearing to be brave heralds of a new order, when by taking the extreme point of view, they are advocating the illogical, ugly and often destructive.

Their “ideology” is a means to making them look good; it is not as ideology should be, a means toward achieving some kind of better state for humanity on earth (the best ideologies, I’ve found, are those which merely build on what nature has done, and do not try to find an “alternative” means of survival, but I digress).

After we finally connected the whole world with wires, wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if what held us back was a lack of mental discipline, self-control, self-actualization, self-esteem, maturity, self-confidence and realism?

Only those with enough of a belief in life to set themselves aside can really communicate, because for them the topic is not the personalities involved, but the topic itself. It is almost as if, for us to see life, we must first move ourselves out of the line of sight.