We Are Losing Our Minds
July 30, 2024·28 comments
Simple statements of fact now arrive as loaded symbols, wrapped in layers of political meaning that have nothing to do with the words themselves. A bullet wound becomes a conspiracy. An illness becomes a coup. The gap between what we say and what people hear has become unbridgeable, and the machinery quietly creating that gap is operating faster than we can think.
- Your brain evolved to absorb stories without conscious effort, and every technology since writing has accelerated that process. The human mind is built to internalize symbols through exposure, emotion, and what others believe about them, often bypassing actual reasoning. Each storytelling modality from oral tradition to writing to television altered this slightly. None of them prepared us for what comes next.
- Social networks represent a complete departure from all previous communication systems, rewiring how we encounter and internalize symbols at a speed our minds cannot match. The permanence of digital communication, the speed of exposure, the omnidirectional nature of messaging, and the constant feedback loops have created an abstraction spiral. Symbols now contain infinite layers of meaning, each one more distant from observable reality.
- Between 2008 and 2010, institutional responses to this shift emerged almost simultaneously: nudge theory, behavioral offices, fact checkers, narrative journalism, and explanation-focused media all appeared as if coordinated. These institutions weren't leveraging social networks as a tool. They were building systematic mechanisms to mediate meaning itself, to provide the "correct" interpretation of symbols too complex for individual minds to untangle.
- Political polarization accelerated precisely when this machinery became sophisticated enough to respond in real time, creating subcultures with entirely different symbolic frameworks and making coexistence with people who see the world differently feel impossible. The feeling that you live in a different reality than your countrymen isn't paranoia. It's accurate. You do. Symbols that mean one thing in one subculture mean something completely different in another, and there's no bridge between them.
- This month's stupidity reveals the true stakes: we've outsourced the work of thinking to symbols we can't interrogate and institutions profiting from our confusion. The question isn't whether we can stop it. We can't. The question is whether we still believe in speaking clearly to one another, risking mockery, and treating people as thinking humans rather than symbols to be decoded.
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Comments
Rusty, this piece definitely represents an evolutionary cornerstone in ET thinking. I look forward to some study time with the print version to develop a better understanding. What Candide said to Pangloss at the end of Voltaire’s Candide. “We must cultivate our own Gardens” continues to ring true if for no other reason than to escape the craziness…
Rusty,
Wow. Thank you for this manifesto.
This will take a long time for me to feel noseblind. Thank you for all the foot notes
Understanding your commentary is how we get across the gyre.
From my personal bottom up perspective, my feeling is much much greater than my thinking.
A few quotes come to mind.
“To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo’s David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingom of Speech
“The power of the human brain was so far beyond the boundaries of natural selection that the term became meaningless in explaining the origins of man.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingom of Speech
The Kingdom of Speech is a critique of Charles Darwin and Noam Chomaky
written by Tom Wolfe (I know, it is that Tom Wolfe)
In the book, Wolfe criticises Darwin and his colleagues for taking partial credit from Alford Wallace for the theory of evolution and ignoring Wallace’s later work on the theory. Wolfe then criticises Noam Chomsky for dismissing Daniel Everett who disputes Chomsky’s claim that all languages are based ultimately on a hard-wired mechanism known as the language acquisition device, (LAD). Wolfe argues that speech, not evolution, sets humans apart from animals and is responsible for all of humanity’s complex achievements.
From goodreads dot com
We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds; all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.
-Antonio Damascio
You still have only one self and one identity. However, self, identity and personality are not things, they are not objects, and they certainly are not rigid. Instead, they are biological processes built within the brain from numerous interactive components, step by step, over a period of time.
-Antonio Damascio
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Harcourt, 2003
Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, Pantheon, 2021
And my old standby,
We live mythically and integrally as it were but we continue to think in the space and time patterns of the pre-electric age.
-Marshall McLuhan
feeler jim
I wonder if there is something to be said here on the matter of cognition. Like maybe we could foster, or tend-to, cognition as an intentional act of counter balancing the Nudge.
Thanks Rusty for being the zeitgeist of our times. A few thing to add,
Thanks Rusty for the great work to pull these thoughts together and get them out to others.
I’m personally concerned with how I feel like I’m losing my own mind more and more these days. I sometimes feel like my own mind is literally dying of consumption and my relationships with the people around me are often paying the price.
Mind you, it’s not like the content I consume all day isn’t great stuff. Most if it is great! It’s just that I seem to be losing the line between consuming content and actually doing something productive with it. My mind is more active than ever but I’m not sure to what purpose.
It also makes me wonder what mind actually is given that it’s state can be heavily so influenced by its local environment. It’s much more environment dependent than I would like to believe.
Great points Richard IMO.
I’ve accepted/embraced the role of environment on my mental outlook a long time ago. Saint Augustine I am not. Heck, that’s why I moved to northern New England in the first place (from Northern VA). Perhaps that’s why we enjoy travel so much - it undeniably helps you to live in the present and discover new things.
For example, if you ever get bored fishing at Smith Mountain Lake you could try (if you have the time) a more wilderness experience in far eastern Maine. Many more Smallmouth bass too!
You might not need fret that you aren’t doing something productive.
If you are paying $$ for the content, you are adding to Gross Domestic Production.
Cui bono is interesting, but is pleasure not the end goal of utility?
It is interesting that you quote the inventor or what was once called the new journalism and could be called narrative journalism. My 20yr old son is reading Bonfire of the Vanities at the moment and its been fun discussing it with him. When I think about the Nazi rallys and how Hitler used the radio and broadcast technology it reminds me that every tyranny has discovered ways to harness new technology. Lets hope we’ve discovered the power of narrative journalism before them.
Ward,
Thank you. Your note made my day.
American Edward Bernays wrote Popaganda in 1928. His work, I believe, influenced Hitler and later Madison Avenue’s grip on capitalism and politics.
Ask your son to use ChatGPT to write a 300 word essay comparing Bernay’s Propaganda with Wolfe’s Bonfires of the Vanities using wikiquotes as the data source.
Post the results.
Jim
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