Acetaminophen, one of the most common drugs found in Tylenol and hundreds of other different household medicines, has been proven in a relatively new study to decrease empathy levels. I don’t see this as incidental. It has also been proven that the internet as well contributes to a lessening of empathy, what with human interactions conducted over the web increasing exponentially, while the very process physically disallows our senses from sending or receiving pheromones and thus removes layers of evolutionary subtext from our dealings. Modernity dehumanizes.
We work more and more in order to spend more and more, denying how we miss the true leisure time of our ancestors by distracting ourselves with modern marvels of escapism, calling it progress. Between our duties and obligations, instead of rest and relaxation we seek out entertainment, and the more distractions and entertainment we have sought out the more the world falls apart in the wake of our collective negligence. Our interpersonal relationships, our environment, our dreams. Plugging in completely, as Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk command, would mean abandoning the real world to the sands of time and the coldness of space. What they propose, an idea gathering momentum among persons for whom reality seems too awkward, too torturous and self-defeating, is essentially a doomsday cult.
Enduring countless menial jobs means lots of time to think things over. It’s an unvoiced argument against the 1% types, that they spend so much time trying to impress each other away from realizing what the world and its peoples therein truly are. But digging a ditch all day, that poor bastard’s mind will wander enough to reach the conclusion without any fancy schoolin’.
With online social networking profiles there is no incentive to truly share notes, despite learning and growing and evolving being both natural and completely necessary. In the real world, we may live alongside rotten neighbors, we may work alongside people with very different approaches to life. But with the social websites we surround ourselves exclusively with like-minded personae, either people who ingratiate themselves to us or people we wish would ingratiate themselves to us, limiting discourse to ranting at avatars in quipped messaging or echoing what our bubble of followers and followed feel is right by their own biases. It directly cultivates the mentality of “You have to accept my ideas but I don’t have to accept your ideas.”
But the Golden Rule though.
The self-involvement of social networking is social engineering, figuratively and literally. The customization of self-serving pocket-dimensions masks the fact that users are herded away from the flesh and blood physical world, insisting on attention for each other’s memes online while that flesh and blood world collapses evermore. Those millions may see the internet as their one escape, whereas ultimately it serves as the largest enabler of their imprisonment, removing them from any definition of corporeal progress.
There was a recent episode aired of a fairly popular television series, possessing a line of dialogue which worked better out of context. “There is no greater good, only good, no matter how small the act.” Take that sentiment and flip its perspective, and you reach a point where the people voting for establishment partisanship are missing. No matter how they justify it, voting the lessor of two or more evils is settling for evil. There honestly are no degrees to good or evil, and the whole wide world is far less complicated of a thing than we make of it. Rationalizing any evil is itself an evil act. And whenever the Electoral College sports against the Invisible College each sporting season, neither stadium sells Moxie cola. If people on Facebook and Twitter sincerely believe they are challenging the status quo and swimming against the currents, they should realize that those platforms are the establishment. If that’s hard to fathom, try cutting those sites and their users out of your life and you will receive nothing but shunning. A gaggle of twerps mistaking their tiny plastic bubbles for authentic free will.
Every problem of the world boils down to people putting personal desires first, most particularly under the illusory guise of doing some good. All villains perceive themselves as heroes. Biological empathy is impossible online, where people only can know false presentations of one another. There are no splatters of blood, no shoulders stained with the tears and snot of our friends going through something real. Meanwhile, allowing ourselves to get bedazzled into a containment spell helps nobody except for the immodest handful who already have the reins.
And just because you like something, does not magically instill it with virtue.