a.k.a. V.J.

“If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction.“

Bertrand Russell

I came across the above quote online a few days ago. My first thought was that Russell had perfectly described the daily folly of a lot of people on social media: they encounter things they don’t agree with and then they get mad about it. The more they scroll, the madder they get; and, of course, they won’t stop scrolling. All that’s left to do is lash out and make somebody else angry. That addiction to continuous rage is just one part of a grab-bag of dysfunctional online habits I call Social Media Brain.

I was tempted to post the Russell quote on Facebook, but ultimately decided against it. My Facebook friends who most need to take Russell’s words to heart are likely to get angry and defensive at the fact that somebody pointed out the foolishness of getting angry over differing opinions. A supreme irony, but I fully expected it would happen, so I refrained from posting.

After arriving at that decision, I started to interrogate my own motives. Why was my first impulse to post the quote? It wasn’t because I wanted to share the wisdom of a great philosopher with my network. The truth was, it would have been a passive-aggressive way for me to take a slap at some of the louder firebrands on the platform, while hiding behind some high-minded rhetoric from a long-dead intellectual. Ultimately, I think that would have been far worse than getting upset about opposing opinions. It also would have been another example of Social Media Brain.

One of the many, many issues I have with social media is that it has weaned people off genuine self-expression. There’s no longer any need to articulate an independent thought. There’s always a prefabricated meme, talking point, link to a highly biased partisan “news” source, or pithy quote to use as ammunition in people’s efforts to “own” the other side. There have always been argumentative blowhards, but in the old days they had to at least try to translate their indoctrination into their own words before they spouted off. Now they just need to hit “share” or copy-and-paste somebody else’s ideas. Weaponizing Bertrand Russell’s observation would have been just another version of that mindless cycle of empty argumentation.

I think it’s really a question of intent. It’s not a matter of whether these bits of canned social-media content are “right,” or smart, or funny, or championing something worthwhile. It’s that they are used like so many rocks and sticks placed on the ground and ready to wield in an online street brawl that only makes everybody more stupid. If you post a great piece of wisdom, but you do so in a sneering effort to get over on people, you are part of the problem and making the world a worse place. (I say that as one who has been very guilty of that behavior in the past.) The constant impulse to behave that way is probably the ultimate manifestation of Social Media Brain. I can’t promise that I’ll never give into that sort of base instinct going forward, but the fact that I even recognize it as a problem in the first place is progress over where I was just a few years ago.