The gleeful disengagement from objective reality is the great crisis of our time. It’s a complex problem: Facebook and other social media, presidential “leadership,” me generation Boomers suffering the psychological pain of failing to self-actualize, the existential crisis by a fading racial majority facing their irrelevance (see Chapel’s monologue on SNL), entertainment merging with news, religion merging with politics, etc.
I have hope over the long haul, but the short term is bad. I don’t know a quick way out, but I hope that the end of the Trump era will turn things down slightly. Facebook and Twitter, for all of their faults, decreased the odds of violence by their censorship. Perhaps they’ll continue with this and we’ll all become more educated about the true dangers of social media. The Boomers will fade in the coming years. Trump is the Boomer id, so maybe his movement will fade as the Boomers fade away.
Entertainment news and religious politics are BBs that will be hard to put back in the box. There’s lots of talk on here about the damage that religion has in politics, but the damage has been been greater the other way. Our country has traded its soul and spiritual and moral grounding for partisan politics. The church died before the country and now the zombie church is killing the country. The “nones” may have to be the ones to save the soul and spiritual foundations of our country.
And entertainment and news: we need to make the news boring again. I blame the journalists, or maybe capitalism. If your news source isn’t boring, it probably isn’t really news. If you’re a political junkie, you aren’t more informed, you are just part of a media fandom. I’m not sure how you put those BBS back in the box.