Is our outrage destroying democracy?
Is America’s outrage machine—social media platforms, political activists and agitators, and cable news—tearing this country apart by monetizing conflict?
Think back on the stories that have dominated the news media over the last few weeks: a journalist being attacked by Antifa, the controversy regarding Nike and Colin Kaepernick and the Betsy Ross flag, the video of a female soccer stars letting the American flag fall to the ground, tweets about a progressive who confronted a tourist wearing a MAGA hat at a DC barbecue joint, and the Detroit music festival that charged white people double.
We are being provoked and bated into a culture war by a political class and the chattering classes who have a mutually-beneficial symbiotic relationship. Unfortunately, for us—the consumers—it is also parasitic one. Modern technology ensures that the news never stops. What is more, news is also entertainment―meant to generate buzz, ratings, tweets, and page views.
This technological shift is the reason that none of the usual remedies and buzz words—more “understanding,” “civility,” or “reconciliation”—aren’t the answer. The answer is to put down our phones and to tune out.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that citizens have a responsibility to be well-informed. The poison is in the dose—and we are overdosing on outrage, under the guise of being informed citizens. As famed Christian author C.S. Lewis once noted, “A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion: to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind–if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else–then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.”
There is one simple thing you can do this weekend to make things better: Turn off your phone and go for a walk.
America’s Outrage Machine Is Spinning Us Into a Death Spiral
Used to be, we could turn the outrage machine off after work. Now, technology and social media have made it inescapable. Is it destroying democracy?
> Read full article at the Daily Beast
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