When everyone wants their own way no one gets their way.
The fervent individualism and rabid determination in the West that everyone’s opinion and lifestyle is equally valid is going to create a situation where solidarity will virtually disappear except in firmly closed groupings.
Just as left of centre groups have always appeared to hate each other much more than the enemy they say is their target, so the same close-minded dogmatism is eating its way into the western public at large. Culture wars are raging.
The tendency to argue rather than discuss has been with us forever, though it was with the advent of the internet and specifically social media platforms that the mutual hate machines really got going. Underpinned by the general intelligence level of those most online the tendency was always going to be toward the vicarious thrill of noising up an opponent in the attempt to win an argument. The other was a rival out of sight and driven out of his or her mind if possible.
The above tendency can now be seen outside the confines of the internet as well as within. Opinions have become virtually exclusive domains that their owners consider inviolate. They are formed quite often in a herd mentality with those they consider as part of ‘their’ crowd. Those with other opinions or viewpoints are hardly even heard, they are merely attacked as if an enemy army attempting to undermine and harm them. Opinions get fixed without much if any real evidence to back them up, they are instead emotionally driven and held corralled forever within fixed minds.
These tendencies exist anywhere where social media and the combative nature of the western way of life can reach. The general outcome resembles a battlefield rather than a debating hall, in fact, this latter if it exists at all must resemble one of the old phone boxes compared to the mega-stadium used to conduct the gladiatorial conflicts usually seen. These battles to the death of ideas, however, tend to be a feature more of the West than the East. In the West, the paucity of in-depth insight and calmly academic knowledge are notable only by their absence.
Now we have the spillover of these conflicts into daily life where an online existence and that of image-engineering, in general, tend to have more reality to many than everyday life itself. A mirroring of the excesses seen in the USA where every oddball concept and insistence of valid reality for obvious fantasies has long been notable has transferred to much of Europe. The current pandemic and the resistance of many to being vaccinated is a case in point. In earlier days if there was a need for a jab you simply turned up, either at school or at some clinic and had it without question. Now a vast idiocy has taken the place of this practical response. Mass fear is generated with scant evidence behind it. The netizens who are most likely to be flamers have had a field day engendering it. Like the hackers who are their brethren, they vastly enjoy any resulting chaos they can generate. It clearly compensates for their lack of any achievement in real, everyday life.
The West is a mess of divisions, many of them joyously created by people who are capable of nothing more than sitting at a computer communicating their hatred of the world in a spirit of dismay and division-creating anarchy. The political elites of the West commit the same kind of crimes due to their need for landing blows on their economic and political adversaries in the East. This combination of individual citizens spreading fantastical and fear-generating communications alongside their governments makes for a world very much at war with itself.
No good at all can come of all this.
Unless the much more reasoning elements in western societies can make their voices heard in more places I see no end to this situation and that the differences between people in the western world will only widen until they hardly have a single thing in common anymore. Westerners will be imbued with an airtight entitlement no matter how ridiculous, wrong-headed and utterly false their thoughts and communications may be. At that point, the West will resemble a completely individuated hell on Earth, a place utterly ungovernable and lost to all reason and any possible capacity to recover.
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