One can endlessly watch three things: fire burning, water flowing, and how political news replace each other in favorite Telegram channels. The last one is especially captivating. Because, unlike the divine incomprehensibility of flame patterns, it is possible to understand the information chaos. For example, I regularly receive anonymous letters from the most active ones, who excel at this. In their letters, they thoroughly and convincingly analyze the geopolitical agenda, find the guilty parties (usually Jews), and, for safety reasons, demand to destroy the letter immediately after reading. They do not write less zealous letters, but if asked, without a shadow of a doubt, they will tell what is happening and who is to blame.
This obvious and depressing schizophrenization of the population has obvious reasons. At least three of them.
Firstly, the mental labor proletarian (the main consumer of political news) has long ceased to suffer from a lack of food and sleep. He is well fed, given mortgages, and not forced to work on weekends. He has a lot of free time that is not occupied.
Secondly, the complete absence of censorship on central information exchange platforms. Neither YouTube, nor Telegram, nor VK will block a video about a new conspiracy in the government or the inevitable collapse of the banking system. However, a video will be blocked, for example, for violence against animals. Violence against your intellect, on the other hand, will not be blocked.
And finally, the third and most important reason: the lack of balanced discussions on official state channels. The clumsy Solovyov-style, which even the most couch potato experts are sick of, plays the role of a censor, using its body to try to shield our interpreter’s curious mind from the flow of vulgar and intriguing details.
Thus, we have a not stupid and fairly educated office plankton. Dull and easy job does not strain his brain. He has a lot of free time, which he does not want to spend on realizing his personal ambitions. He has long lost hope for social mobility (or never had it). Despite all this, he daily filters through hundreds of fakes and dozens of intriguing interpretations, while not hearing anything from scared journalists of official media except for boring clichés.
What does our hero do? He tries to form some believable version of what is happening in his head, observing the chaotic and rapidly changing picture on the screen. While the amount of information available to him for analysis is minuscule compared to what is needed to form a truly believable and objective picture, he still tries to formulate the principles by which the universe operates. With the help of RenTV and “Istoriya Pi”, he tries to solve a complex puzzle, connecting, for example, the reasons for the internecine wars of Ancient Russia in the 14th century with the speech turns of Kamala Harris’ pre-election debates. And he succeeds!
Sooner or later, lonely and helpless under the pressure of infomusor, he turns into a devoted adept of one of the conspiracy versions of what is happening. By piecing together the facts known to him into a mosaic, he achieves a certain logic in the relationships between them. To prevent the mosaic from falling apart, he spends all his intellectual and emotional potential searching for confirmation of his conclusions.
He fanatically defends what he has built with such difficulty, namely his personal worldview. In it, like in a fairy tale, there are good and evil wizards, beautiful princesses and hobbits, their own rules and laws. Defending this fairy-tale world becomes the purpose of his life, and every info dump is a potential threat, as it can destroy the fairy tale, suddenly turning the beautiful princess, for example, into a corrupt prosecutor. Therefore, it is either declared fake if it contradicts the mosaic, or it turns into a repost. Our hero moves through the information space like through a minefield, unable to detach for a moment.
Did you know that in China, any political content on video streaming platforms is prohibited? Maybe this is the right decision if we want to save the brains of our citizens from schizophrenia?
Perhaps a working person from Samara doesn’t need to be informed daily about what is happening in Horlivka or Tehran? Maybe in order to live a useful and productive life, it is enough for them to watch a 15-minute news program “Vremya” before bed? Perhaps, similar to the ban on alcohol for teenagers, it makes sense to ban political news for the majority of the country’s residents, as they only harm them, just like alcohol harms children?
Look, there will be fewer “informed” interpreters of political chaos, and there will be more healthy people.
Translated by ChatGPT gpt-3.5-turbo/42 on 2024-09-22 at 06:18
