There are a couple of things feeding my thinking here. First was a recent discussion with a friend. I’d read a piece listing the most popular iOS and Android apps downloaded last June or July. Among the top 20, virtually every one was either a game or other entertainment app. Not more than one or two, if any, supported personal or professional development. And I voiced the (admittedly judgmental) opinion that people are using games and entertainment to escape the shallowness of their lives. And my friend countered with, “…or, maybe that’s all there is? Maybe that’s as deep as most people get?”
This was an epiphany, one of those moments. I felt the earth move under my feet. I saw the brilliance of an argument I once dismissed out of hand, that language in humans developed to facilitate gossip. We are essentially a social species, and in one such as ours, it makes total sense: We are happy to be entertained, groomed, gossip, eat, sleep and breed…wow!
In retrospect, this is unsurprising. But the converse is what resonates: The sentient travelers are the anomalies, the outsiders. Wow! Maybe we’re genetic mutants? If so, it opens the door to the “leadership gene,” and also to my next post on Richard Dawkins.
These internet users are seeking to momentarily escape the suffocating banality of daily life by finding new diversions when present diversions grow stale. They scurry about on the surfaces of their lives with no thought of the depths swirling dynamically below. This behavior has a strategic value insofar as it spares them the anxiety that is attendant upon rigorous and dedicated self-scrutiny. Even if steeled to survey their interiority, they lack the interpretative skills necessary to make sense of what they might find. Better to avoid the incomprehensible, better to stay on the surface of life, sharing its evanescent pleasures with like-minded folk and avoiding or ridiculing those who plunge into the depths. And if one learns to live deeply, the surface will become ever less habitable and its denizens ever less congenial.
Thanks, Michael, only I get the sense you missed my point.
What if, as my buddy suggested, they are NOT trying to escape, to find diversions from anything? What if this is as deep as most people get? Before his comment, I was thinking as you are, but not now. It changed how I look at everything around this, and how I view those who question and those who don’t. More and more, I am coming to believe the tendency to question, to lead, to break away from the pack is an anomaly, very possibly a genetic one. Maybe it’s just a tendency to “not conform.” But regardless, there is something going on.
No, I don’t think the difference is black and white, or “us and them.” It’s a long continuum, complicated by the richness and complexity of our biological, cultural and individual diversity . But, if I think of our differences this way, it helps me understand the gulf I feel between myself and the vast majority of people I see out in the world.
This is, of course, an extremely dangerous subject culturally, fodder for critics of elitism and classism, the root of the argument for a ruling aristocracy. I take pains in my little blog to not be inflammatory, so even voicing this bothers me. But really, if accepted at face value, this idea is both stunning and inflammatory…and it explains much of human history (at least to me!).
As I wrote the above reply, this Monty Python scene came to mind. I think it does a brilliant job of illustrating both class differences AND why we can’t think of this categorically, as black and white.
These people are Not trying to escape the surface; they want to stay on the surface but with a new diversion in the same domain. The internet offers endless possibilities for diversions of this sort—all on the surface of experience. This subject is dangerous only in the minds of those who have no conception of what genuinely powerful and commanding human beings are like. The truly powerful are drawn irresistibly to growth, creativity, self-discipline, knowledge and emotional depth—they inevitably regard tyrants like Hitler and Stalin as miscreant weaklings by comparison. What kind of exploitation could such a rarity act out that would gain him or her characterological excellence? How could he appropriate such qualities by victimizing others? Can you steal intelligence, depth of feeling, piercing insight and concise articulations of meaning? Could you force someone who has enviable traits to relinquish them under torture? You could model your own behavior on careful observation of an elevated person’s demeanor and action, but how would that constitute anything dangerous? The best people are simply not drawn to anything so petty as dominance and submission. They can’t be bothered with such trash. They have far better things to consider. They are quite willing to leave exploitation to their inferiors.