One of the texts on my “summer reading” list was “The Plague” (by Albert Camus). I had never read anything of Camus’ before, and I was stunned by his immense ability to explicate intricate details of human thought and behavior, and also very eloquently at that:
this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule [1]
Albert Camus, “The Plague”
I am at a point right now, where I sense callousness and apathy from all sides, while I go under in a pool of bullshit as if I were sinking in quicksand.
One of my central missions, ideas and struggles over the past couple decades has been raising awareness for the illness I refer to as “retard media” (you would not be severely wrong to equate this with what many other people refer to as “social media”, but you would actually be largely wrong – for more on this, see my definition of “retard media”). Recently, Netflix published a documentary called “The Social Dilemma” – and this documentary echoes a lot of what I have been saying all along (except that the proposed solution is actually quite remarkably along the lines of “more of the same”).
More of the same bullshit: What a dismal outlook for humanity. I have said for many years already, that I am not at all proud of the species I apparently belong to.
Retard media is not the only catastrophic disaster happening in our world, but regretably it’s one most people don’t get — let alone do they realize that it is indeed a catastrophic disaster that works like a catalyst, a steroid to boost the power of humanity’s ignorance of other catastrophic disasters most humans seem very callous and apathetic towards. Boost the power! Boost the power of ignorance – that is what humanity has come to. I distinctly remember sitting on a sofa with my brother and sister, sometime in the last millennium, watching a weather report during a hurricane event. The weatherman was babbling on about some statistics, and then said something like “let’s see what our reporter out on the beach is experiencing” … and I commented “let’s go to the videotape” … and my bother completely cracked up. Of course kids today may have never even heard of the expression “let’s go to the videotape”, but there was an era of sportscasting highlights where this expression was as regular, ordinary and standard as greeting someone on the street with a “hello” or “good day”. Today, the expression shines out like a rare antiquity of a bygone era, but what remains standard is the monetization of the incredible, the sensationalist, the clickbait.
“There’s a sucker born every minute” seems as steadfast today as the day P.T. Barnum was alleged to have said it, centuries ago.
This week, an online friend said / wrote to me (essentially – I have slightly changed the wording, in order to protect the privacy of my friend … but the meaning of the statement is, IMHO, still the same): “I understand that this is very important to you” — and added that this is simply not on their radar – not in the slightest (*). At first, I was very appreciative of their apparent empathy, but then on second (or maybe third) thought it slowly began to dawn on me what the significance of “to you” in this expression is (after all, following Zipf’s insights into the economics of expressions [in particular the one known as the “principle of least effort”], there must be something to motivate someone to express those two additional syllables which would alternatively seem superfluous). Also following Gricean maxims of implicature, it must be that “this” in the above expression is apparently deemed not important in the standard case.
Is that callous or apathetic? Or is it really just me?