How many times have you heard someone talk about Covid in the privacy of their own home, these last couple of years?
How about the Covid vaccine? How about Joe Biden? How about Donald Trump? How many times have you heard someone talk about used car prices, or Ukraine, or Putin, or Elon Musk, or supply chain disruption?
How many times have you heard someone talk about these topics in an angry, opinionated way?
How about ideas like “all Republicans are nationalist bigots with no compassion,” or “all Democrats are weak-minded clowns with no ability to think logically”? How about the idea that old white men are the cause of all of our problems? Or the idea that entitled college students are the cause of all of our problems?
My guess is, you’ve heard someone talk about one or more of these things at just about every family get-together, especially the last couple of years. Every bar, every girls’ night out, even at the lunch table at work. My guess is, your experience has been like mine. You see that everybody talks about these things all the time even when they have almost no information and they have opinions that make no sense. And that they always seem angry.
Why?
Losing the ability to think
Because we can’t help ourselves. Because we’ve been infected with these emotionally- and morally-charged topics as one gets infected with a virus. Because these topics enter our bodies through language and imagery and we exhibit symptoms as one does with the flu.
Our minds run on vocabulary and imagery. Whatever tools we have to think with are the tools we think with. A Baptist minister thinks with the vocabulary and imagery that the Bible gives him. He sees the world through Biblical concepts. A businessperson thinks about the world through the lens of pros, cons, risks, and reputation. She thinks about the world as a web of businesslike relationships. A political activist sees everything as a struggle between classes or groups, or a struggle between moral axioms or government systems. Those are the tools he uses to analyze the world around him — those are the concepts that dominate his thoughts.
The stronger the imagery and vocabulary that run someone’s mind (or that their mind runs on), the more extreme their perspectives. The stronger the language, the less capable they are of thinking critically or rationally. Or with nuance.
Look at Orwell’s 1984, for example. The government literally took words out of circulation. The government literally changed the way people think by controlling the words they are able to think with. Over the course of a few generations, words can slip into or out of usage — and before you know it, children do not even think about the world the same way their grandparents did. Because the vocabulary that runs their entire lives changes. The imagery against which they test and measure the world has changed.
I mean, imagine that you live in a world like Orwell’s. Imagine your life is run by people who do nothing but lie all the time. But imagine also that you don’t know what the word “lie” is. Imagine that you don’t know the word “corrupt” or the word “dishonest” or the word “bullshit.” Imagine you have no yardstick against which to measure the honesty of someone’s behavior.
Well, then dishonesty and corruption don’t even occur to you. They don’t even register as possibilities. Because whatever doesn’t feel right about this situation… you simply can’t express it. You don’t have a pre-existing framework to compare it to. You don’t have an image of “dishonest” in your head to map the current situation onto. So you just go on feeling like something isn’t quite right, and you say nothing. (Although, in 1984, if the Party noticed you feeling this way, they’d make you disappear.)
It’s extremely hard for someone to think about something for which they do not have words. That’s, in some sense, what philosophy is all about, and that’s why it moves so slowly. Because it can take someone an entire lifetime to figure out how to say one thing.
Conversely, it’s extremely easy for people to operate in the world when they think they have the answer to literally everything. Which is why cults, totalitarian states, and polarized tribal systems end up being so effective at controlling people. They claim to have all of the answers to everything, and they claim that those answers all fit into a nice, neat framework and all you have to do is learn that framework.
Hitler didn’t just tell people that Jews are bad. He told them that the Jews are the cause of every problem in our economy. Even with a trivial amount of common sense, one would remember that the German economy was destroyed by catastrophically losing World War I. Not by some sneaky, back-alley enemy who charges high interest rates.
When you are given extreme language to think about the world with, you really don’t have to do any thinking. Critical thinking is not required. In fact, critical thinking is not allowed. In fact, once you get in deep enough, critical thinking is not possible. Because you’ve forgotten how to even say or think things that do not fall in line with the prescribed beliefs. You end up losing the language with which you might escape from the trap you’ve been lured into.
You are told what the correct beliefs are, you are given the proper (extreme, unforgiving, completely nuanceless) language with which to think, and you are told to go on a be a good little steward of whatever ideology has been injected into you.
Ego and outrage
You can also see this phenomenon at work with things like gossip. Or bad information about Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos. Or the intolerant, fearmongering language of fundamentalist religion.
We spread bad ideas, bad takes, and bad information from person to person to person because they arouse things inside of us. Things like fear, anger, moral outrage, and ego problems. Things like… a desire to be the first to bring some controversial story to our group of friends. Things like pride for being on the correct moral side of things. Things like seeming clever for having such a unique, sharp take on something. We like how that feels. We are obsessed with how that feels.
We spread these ideas from person to person to person because we have been overtaken by them and we must find a way to express them. To be part of them, and to have them be part of us. It’s almost a physical phenomenon — it’s almost like we physically have to express ourselves on these topics, or we can’t relax.
And by the time something like “supply chain” reaches the average household, it’s no longer even a useful topic. It’s just a disease. It’s just a symptom of the viral spread of bad ideas and terrible opinions. By the time something like “supply chain” reaches the average household, nobody has any idea what they’re talking about. And yet it’s almost as if they can’t help themselves but to talk about it. Like the topic has overtaken their mind and the symptoms must display themselves.
We vomit up words, angrily. We get outrage fever. We shiver with anxiety because these topics and the world are so scary and irritating. We absolutely must bring these topics up with other people. We feel compelled. Even when we have nothing to say. We’ll sit in a circle and puke outrage all over each other, even when we agree with each other. Especially when we agree with each other.
And what is that doing? Clearly it’s not accomplishing anything. It’s making us sicker. It’s like sitting in an enclosed space, incubating a virus with the right mixture of moisture and heat. Taking the infection deeper and letting it replicate for further spreading.
Bad instincts and fountains
There are information fountains strategically placed throughout our society. The most prolific fountain is your television. CNN and Fox News are not news channels, they are virus distribution points. They distribute neat little packages of extreme language and hot-button topics to every American household that wants one. They distribute viral language and imagery through the screen, directly into your bloodstream. Intravenous heroin is nothing compared to the seething pull of viral language.
That coworker that is always gossiping about everyone — that is another virus distribution point. Or that friend that is always talking about how insane Bill Gates is and how he wants to enslave everyone through science-fiction healthcare. These are the vertices from which bad ideas spread into society. And, even if there is some truth in these ideas, it doesn’t matter. Because they aren’t being discussed. They’re being spread and they are inhabiting people. There’s a difference. Discussion is the exchange of ideas. Infection is the one-directional placement of ideas.
I read a book by Neal Stephenson called Snow Crash, and it changed my life. It gives an actual historical account of this phenomenon — of language as a viral entity. Now, granted, it is science fiction and therefore dramatized. And yet the story made nothing but sense to me. It depicts language not just as a tool (and it is a wonderful tool), but as an infectious phenomenon that actually gets inside your head and changes you. Changes who you are as a sentient being.
I first heard about this book from Ben Hunt. He and the Epsilon Theory writers look at (and write about) the world through the lens of narrative. They describe the world through the lens of stories and language, and they describe how stories and language are used to direct, nudge, control, and undermine the average citizen and his values. I’m not going to get lost in the weeds here on conspiracy, government distrust, or negative thinking. That’s not my intention (and it’s not theirs either). My intention is simply to share these resources with you and explain how they have changed my thinking.
I look at the world through stories. Especially good stories. Because stories, in my view, are truer than facts. Stories are what move us. They can make us behave and think in ways that “objective facts” cannot. Encyclopedias cannot instill values into your life or your heart; stories can.
Consumers of media love negativity. They respond to it strongly. And, after getting tangled up in it deeply enough, they need it. They actually cannot get through their week without it. They need it in doses — and so they plug back in and keep looking for more emotionally-charged narratives to react to.
There’s an evolutionary reason that negative thinking grips us more powerfully than positive thinking. It’s a survival mechanism. If you’re in the wilderness and you think you heard a lion, the person who says “ahh, it’ll be fine” is less likely to survive than the person who says “we have to get the fuck out of here, now. That was a lion. I swear, that was a lion. It’s going to kill us, we have to get the fuck out of here.”
But, as a recurring theme in human life, we must have the mental power and the constitutional fortitude to overcome our primitive biology. We are no longer primitive beings — we operate in an extremely complex and nuanced world. And, by and large, we are no longer at risk of being eaten by lions. We must be able to think carefully — to not treat every signal as a survival signal.
So language gets into a lot of us through television. Or through some article online. Or the newspaper or some politician’s speech, or some lady at work or whatever. Negative, extreme, fear- and hate-mongering language. And it grips us. And then it spreads, because we are the instruments that spread it. We are the hosts. We are complicit, whether we think we are or not.
From the fountains of bad information and terrible ideas, language and imagery spread as far as they possibly can — all the way to people who were nowhere near the fountain to begin with. And the virus arrives at our dinner tables and makes fools of us all, because none of us actually knows anything about what it is we’re so upset about. It’s all outrage, no utility. All moral posturing, no truth.
Sometimes you’ll hear that some meme went viral. Or some silly video went viral. And that’s cute. “Oh, internet, you’re so silly.”
What I’m saying is, all of the worst and most gripping ideas in our lives are viral. And I don’t mean viral playfully, like “have you heard this.” I mean viral as in, spreading without our voluntary participation because we cannot stop it. We can’t help ourselves. Our instincts, our egos, and our fears are in control of us. The result is bad language.
A harnessed feeling of alarm
The people and institutions that produce and distribute these packages of viral language and imagery know what they’re doing. They are using your brain as a relay point for bad ideas. They are infecting you with bad information because they know what you’ll do with it.
And what you’ll do with it is treat your cousin like garbage because he doesn’t believe in Christ quite the same way you do, and therefore is condemned to hell. We must stay away from that cousin, because he’s a non-believer. He’s dangerous. He’s our enemy. He will keep us from getting what we’re owed for being such good people. Look at us, We Are Such Good People.
What you’ll do with it is hate your neighbor for something he didn’t do. For political decisions that his “side” made, which he did not vote on or contribute to. What you’ll do with it is blame your neighbor the Republican for the repeal of abortion rights and say that he doesn’t care about human life, even though he didn’t vote on it, doesn’t support it and can’t do anything about it.
What you’ll do with it is knight yourself as a Crusader in the Fight For All That Is Good, and clothe yourself in the warm animal furs of conviction and confidence the way a king would. What you’ll do with it is bestow upon yourself the title of Educated and Enlightened Citizen, neither of which you are.
Politicians, corporate interests, etc. know exactly what you'll do. You'll go to war with your neighbor because, despite living next door to each other, your televisions are set to two different channels. And that makes all the difference. The endless fountains of poison in your homes have different sources. They are opposite. They explode when combined, killing both of you in the name of your parties.
The litmus test is this: the more alarming something is, the more likely it’s bullshit. The more likely it is that it will infect you and turn you into a fool. If some statement or idea is broad, sweeping, and alarming, then it’s probably bullshit and it was probably concocted so that you’d spread it to somebody else to serve a Power Greater Than Yourself. That power might be “God,” it might be your political party, or it might be somebody who makes 12 billion dollars a year and doesn’t pay any taxes.
What to do about it
Now, in the sub-header, I promised you a vaccine. It is possible to inoculate yourself against bad ideas, bad takes, and extreme thinking. It is possible to inoculate yourself against language spreading through you like a virus and using you as a host.
The vaccine contains a few ingredients.
It requires having positive, grounded words and imagery in your life.
It requires being able to say “I don’t know, that’s a great question.”
It requires having control over the flow of thoughts in your own head. The vaccine is working with language and using it as a tool, rather than letting it use you.
You build up your immune system by being in a family that talks things through calmly. By having friends who prefer to think positively rather than negatively. You build up your immune system by reading. I find that the most important ingredient for me is reading constantly.
I find that, as long as I continue putting good, useful words and imagery in my head, I am inoculated against terrible thinking. Not immune. Never immune. But resistant. It's less likely to infect me, and when it does, it's usually less severe. The same way a flu shot works.
And it's not something that can be done one time and then you're good for seven years like a tetanus shot. It's a vaccine that must be taken every day in order to keep your immune system healthy.
It's a lot harder to get infected with silly bullshit when there are actual, useful thoughts floating around your head all the time.
And it’s work. Having the vaccine against viral language is not simple. It takes a lot of work.
It’s a lot harder to do all of this than it is to just passively let bad ideas grip you. That’s easy. There aren’t a lot of people who want to read all the time and constantly absorb new ideas. There aren’t a whole lot of people who want to explore history and learn some lessons that might help them with today’s problems. And there certainly aren’t a lot of people who want to think critically about the people they choose to spend time with.
Unfortunately, good language doesn't spread virally. Helpful imagery and positive vocabulary do not spread virally. Because they don’t awaken those urgent emotions and instincts. They don’t trigger a survival response. Which means, as always in life, it takes work to be on the right side of things.
But what choice do you have? Do you want language to be a virus in your life, or do you want it to be a tool?
Drink some water. But make sure it isn’t poisoned with bad ideas first.
JDR
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” - H.L. Mencken
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