Online Attention Competition Distorts Reality

Not just the legacy media has lost their minds

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters— Francisco Goya

It’s a brave not-so-new world most of us live in daily online. Were we upvoted or were we not?

The pluses and minuses could easily fill one book or ten. It’s a digital minefield out there.

But one of the most treacherous shoals in this minefield, and one I have been guilty of myself, is the, sometimes desperate, need for attention.

It’s among the oldest of human excesses (see Leo Brody’s “The Frenzy of Renown”) amplified by today’s high technology.

The pattern is clear. Once attention is paid, more and yet greater attention is craved. It has the characteristics of a form of mental illness, a dopamine addiction exacerbated by unacknowledged greed, which is often the byproduct.

We might call it “megaclickitis,” not as serious as diabetes or certainly cancer, but bad enough. And a product of our own minds like Goya’s magnificent and disturbing “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”.

We are all part of this but those who control the most popular websites and podcasts are the biggest perpetrators. They have the most to gain and deserve most of the blame. They are the ones who, with our unfortunate acquiescence, create an abnormal distortion of reality that has ramifications well beyond the digital world. People, sometimes millions, are led to believe nonsense, too often of a dangerous sort.

We see this all around us. How does an historian (or pseudo-historian, depending on your view) get attention? He or she (in this case he) brands Churchill, not Hitler, as the primary villain of World War II, generating clicks galore. Would that same person have garnered any attention writing yet another excoriation of evil Adolph when there are libraries filled with them? Not likely. Did this “historian” realize this consciously or unconsciously in order to gain attention? You decide.

This is not to say that Churchill was perfect (who is?) but to point out an obvious motivation for these distortions that are all around us. Another was a person recently claiming Joseph Stalin, who murdered more Jews than anyone but Hitler, was Jewish. The amount of contrary evidence is staggering—Stalin had Christian Orthodox parents and entered an Orthodox seminary at 14 until he was kicked out for his politics— yet clicks were achieved, many of them.

Did the hosts of either of these two interviews really believe what their guests were saying or did they conveniently convince themselves to nod their heads at or sympathize with normally outrageous and reactionary opinions to garner attention because caught up in their own, not inconsequentially lucrative, “frenzy of renown”? Did these hosts, both of whom claim to be conservatives or libertarians stop to consider they just might be gilding a very dangerous lily or flat out lying to massive audiences and what effect that might have? Talk about the sleep of reason producing monsters. (I am not naming the names of the hosts here because one of them is or was an old friend of sorts and I take it too personally. I cannot believe he harbored the world’s oldest calumny.)

Obviously the above are meant to be rhetorical questions, but again you can decide (and should).

But that’s not all. Just as social media feeds us constantly with misinformation with which to deal, the most absurd public acts occur because social media exists. The internet provides fertile ground for many pointless or destructive actions to flourish.

Would these two recent events ever have occurred previous to social media and the internet? They seem to have been built for it as real-time publicity stunts for the millions. The young will get it online, the old there and on cable.

One is the “glam” all female eleven minute space flight taken via Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company. This “space adventure” has been heavily criticized online as frivolous considering how much more (way much actually) astronauts, male and female, had been achieving for decades, but attention was paid. Wannabe cosmonaut Katy Perry’s musical career had been fading and, as she made all-too-clear to the world, she has a new album coming out.

Less frivolous, actually more seriously creepy, was the journey of Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md) to El Salvador to demand and eventually get a head-to-head with illegal alien Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who may or may not be a member of the brutal MS-13 gang (apply the duck test). Hitherto far less known than, say, Katy Perry—and that’s undoubtedly the point since we have all of a sudden been hearing of the senator’s presidential aspirations—Sen. Van Hollen has returned with “words of love” to Abrego Garcia’s he-battered-me-but-now-it’s-fine spouse while proclaiming himself the savior of due process. Don’t guffaw.

In news breaking as of this writing that we could categorize as not-so-great for Sen. Van Hollen, it is being reported Mr. Abrego Garcia was suspected of human trafficking in 2022 by Homeland Security. Also, it was confirmed by “official law enforcement investigations" that Garcia is indeed a member of MS-13, evidently with an official rank in the gang’s hierarchy.

The Tennessee Star has much more extensive coverage, including a cover up of Mr. Garcia’s human trafficking escapades that should put a further nail in Van Hollen’s ever more justified political coffin, though the senator, who seems clueless even after all the ridicule, seems unlikely to acknowledge it.

But what are we to make of this? Not much we didn’t suspect, except I submit Sen. Van Hollen’s self-deluding trip would not have happened without an online world on which to comment minute-by-minute (faster than cable) and endlessly amplify what is now apparently become a non-event that should put the senator out of the running for a presidential nomination, assuming he was ever in it in the first place.

It was essentially just more social media litter with which we clutter our brains—yet another version of Goya’s “Sleep of Reason…”

So what do we do about all this?

Not too much I’m afraid, except that most of us have learned over the years not to trust the mainstream media, now the legacy media, from The New York Times down to its many disciples. The same, unfortunately, now goes for new media. There is no such thing as a trusted source, although many pretend to be and, I guess we could say, try hard to be.

Nevertheless, everybody’s motives, including mine, are suspect to some degree or another, though the two hosts noted above would do well to examine theirs. Whatever the case, the old Reagan admonition to “trust but verify” will always apply to all, even though it is all-too-frequently not possible to do the latter.

But my advice, largely to myself but possibly useful to others, for the many occasions when verification is not possible is, alas, to just finally let it go from the forefront of your consciousness, no matter how difficult that is—and it is. (Trust me. I identify.) All things will pass.

Don’t harbor grudges. Don’t hate, even when it’s justified.

God or G-d is still here. The people that are causing you anguish with all their lies and deceptions will relatively shortly not be.

I remember as a kid, maybe 7 or 8, reading the following in my then beloved “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”: “God is dead— Nietzsche” with the response “Nietzsche is dead—God.” I thought that was funny at the time, though I had no idea who Nietzsche was or how to pronounce his name. Nowadays, I no longer think it funny, but I certainly know it to be true. We should hang in there. and remember Who is in charge Faith exists for a reason.