Reverberation Rooms, A Modern Disaster

The intellectual dishonesty going on in today’s political and academic discourse is one of the greatest threats facing our society.  People have become far too stubborn and arrogant.   They are not willing to have a reasonable discussion and are not open to outside ideas.  Because of this people put themselves into bubbles of their own making; they create artificial safe-spaces and echo-chambers where they do not have to deal with the self-reflection and disappointment that comes with being questioned and being wrong.

These bubbles are akin to a self-imposed imprisonment–a place where we lock our minds into cages and throw away the key.   This habit is exacerbated by the development of the Internet into its modern manifestation–a dopamine fueled mock-colosseum–where we put up the facade of a true fight between competing ideas, when in reality it is just our ideas competing against the attenuated strawmen of our opponents for the goal of instant gratification.  This cowardly affair is hazardous to the health of public discourse.

The danger of this cushioned internet does not come as a direct result of the technology but rather a self-imposed side-effect.  This danger arises from the complacency developed by the padded rooms that are the majority of forums, messageboards, and social media sites. We cannot have true evolution of ideas into that darwinian ideal of an argument perfectly suited for its environment if we do not open the gates and allow dangerous and alien ideas to compete for the same resources (attention and retention) as our own.  

This mind-caging has atrophied our discourse and lessened the ability of our ideas to defend themselves.  When an animal is free of predatory threats or has little competition for resources it becomes like the Dodobird–weak, slow, dumb, and unknowingly suicidal.  The same applies to ideas.  An idea if left in a bubble will become weak, slow, dumb, and unknowingly willing to let a hostile ideology wipe it out.

It is imperative that we, as members of society, recognize when we have constructed a bubble around ourselves and do whatever we can to burst these bubbles with the sharp stick of new ideas. If we fail to do this, the ideas that are the basis of modern western civilization will be conquered, destroyed, and forgotten to the sands of time; they will be violently overwhelmed by a hostile ideology antithetical to our own.