The Cult Of Ignorance: The Biggest Cult Of Them All

A lot of us have been on social media for quite some time and one of the things that we should have learned by now is that opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one.

Social media gives you the opportunity to say whatever you want about whatever you want and if you word it carefully enough you can pretty much get away with anything you want. And so a lot of people do.

But the downside of all this is that there are a great many people, some would say too many, who tend to believe everything they see on social media. When you have such a divergence of opinion over such a long period of time, what can happen to the weaker minds is that reality becomes distorted, and even a little unreal.

People with a cause to sell or minds to brainwash have found, quite literally, an endless supply of willing victims here. And as we have seen, probably most clearly and dramatically in America, these distortions can pull people so far from reality, that they actually start believing that the world view they have assembled, based on lies, half truths and the repositioning of ideologies, is perfectly valid.

This is why you can talk to them and hear the craziest shit spewing from them with great conviction. Of course, it is completely fact challenged and in a lot of cases incomprehensible, but it’s what these poor, sad people believe. And that belief gives them something they may not have had before. It gives them a community and illusion that they are changing he world somehow.

The sad part is that it’s all fake. It was all carefully planted in their brains by people who knew the buzzwords that would attract them, and the fake promises that would make them feel there was something in it for them.

A lot of people think that the people I am talking about are all idiots. But I don’t believe that. I believe that many of them are probably very bright, but just lazy thinkers, and when you put everything in front of them on a silver platter that doesn’t strain the brain to consume, they eat it all up. I believe that many of them, for one reason or another, feel marginalized by the world they live in. Still more are heavily influenced by their peers and on and on it goes.

Then one day, a savior appears. He tells them that everything  is crap. He assures them that he is out to fix that crap and make it right for them. It could have been Hitler. It could have been Mussolini, Mao Tse Tung or Donald Trump. This has been going on for quite some time, but now, with the astonishing number of people on social media, the market for scammers, grifters and charlatans has never been more appealing or plentiful.

The big problem is how you fix it. We’re really talking about a cult of massive size that is constantly being preached to. And constantly forming resistance to virtually any progressive ideas that are out there.  

You doin;t have to spend a lot of time on social media to be astonished at just how easy it is to create and get away with lies and half truths and distortion of reality here. Sure, the sites catch some of it, but the vast majority of it goes unchecked. If you are a literate, progressive thinker, you probably don’t notice a lot of the crap that shows up every day. You brain processes it quickly and tells your finger to keep scrolling. Or you make it a point to try and keep your walls as clean and crap free as possible.

But if you take the time to look for this stuff, it’s out there in vast quantity, and it’s constantly working on the lazy thinkers, teaching them all about anarchy and sedition and eventually getting them to believe that black is white. The paradox is that when the search engines do start clamping down on this stuff, they are often met with complaints from both the progressive and regressive sides.

The Bottom Line

Nobody is really to blame here but a massive cult of ignorance has been created here on social media, and as try as we might, I fear we are stuck with it for a long time to come.