Turns out “personalized news” isn’t good for democracy, our communities and our health. At all. Echo chambers hollow out the human mind and deprive us of one of our most treasured possessions- the ability to create a variety of thought, particularly original thought. If we all think alike, then after a while, we’ll only be recycling our old, stale ideas amongst ourselves, without even realizing that we’ve stopped thinking altogether.
Thinking ceases when the mind is unchallenged. Brain activity may be a sign of life, but it is hardly indubitable evidence of mental inventiveness and renewal. We’re quick to throw out stale food because we wisely deduce that it’s unconducive for good bodily health. If only we were this conscientious about discarding stale and moldy mental cuisine that can augur illness in the most malleable and impressionable part of the human person- our minds.
And this disease of a deadened mind can metastasize to the soul, whereby every waking thought is a selfish one, where the narcissists among us are counted as wise, and the greedy seen as smart role models. Nary a thought is proffered for others if it won’t garner us some equitable tangible material gain. Thus, we place our hearts and souls on the sales block, transacting them for the flimsiest gain, while professing ourselves to be clever.
People are never so deceived than when they’re wholly convinced of how infallibly clever they are.
We forget that our greatest thoughts and noblest acts are conceived when the object of our focus in not the self. Alas, our basest thoughts are often found when self is the center of our every endeavor and imagining. Then, we re-ingest what was regurgitated, because our unbothered minds lost the ability to distinguish one from the other.
And so, to rob us, the world hides the scheme of its robbery in the most obvious, yet least-detectable place: the self. They make everything about you, to make you feel “special”, albeit like the fattened calf just before it’s slaughtered. Tell them the world is all about them and you can rob them as easily as you please. Tell them everything must be sacrificed for them and they will sell themselves to you for pittance, and be none the wiser. Tell them “all for one, and one for one” is the newer, better motto. All is to be sacrificed for one, the same one whose every exhaustive thought is ever only on one, the one: self. Narcissism is the new virtue.
But a small heart makes for a small world.
Strip him dry by promising him all, all for him, aught for others. Occupy him with small thoughts of himself and his world will shrink in accordance with the shrinkage in his mind. And before long, he would have lost all, because he was lost himself. The weightiest part of him drowned in the shallowest water. No wonder our children are drowning in puddles of scanty waters, the roiling pungent sewage from a self-absorbed, self-exalting society.
So no, I want no uniformity of company or thought. I’d rather diversify my world, most of all, my thoughts. For as surely as I may loose my way from time to time, it’ll be easy to find my way if everything didn’t look, sound, taste or feel the same. How could I tell if I’m on mile one or mile ten thousand when all is same? Surely, men have perished from fewer ailments than when they mistake sameness for oneness. Oneness is unity, sameness is loss of humanity.
The eclecticism will help me point my way back, may be not necessarily to the old and familiar yesterday, but to a new, uncertain, and unsettling tomorrow. I’ll take it. Gladly. For as good as yesterday might have been, I’d rather wager for an even better tomorrow. Nothing is ever as good as it could ever possibly be, hence my wager. I’d rather be the brave, starry-eyed adventurer who sought new worlds and found none, than the fearful fragile fool who stayed home, and is guaranteed to discover nothing.
Turns out, we’re called to be different, but to find our collective homogeneity in the person of our Creator. That is the only place where it is safe to be homogeneous.
Anything else is error.