I’ve written before about how Donald Trump represents our collective shadow in terms of racism and xenophobia, but he also represents the shadow side of the internet. His latest move withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO) is like unfriending someone on Facebook because you don’t like what they’re saying.
First off, I want to say I think the “unfriend,” “block,” and “mute” features on social media are important and necessary because no one should be subjected to abuse, but also there can be an element of using those features to create confirmation bias or insularity. These days you don’t have to listen to anyone who disagrees with you. You can ignore what other people say with relative ease. I notice this in my own life – whenever I post about Black Lives Matter on my professional Instagram account, I lose followers. That’s OK, I’ll keep posting about it, but it speaks to the shadow side of the internet.
We get to intentionally create our reality, our communities, and connect with like-minded individuals, which is great! But it can also lead to a disconnect from reality. If I only surround myself with people who think the Earth is flat, of course that will be what I believe. The statistics vary, but anywhere from 2% to more than 20% of people believe the Earth is flat! Even if it’s 2%, that’s a huge swathe of people. The notion continues to gain momentum because it has support from numerous Facebook groups and Youtube channels. The way we human beings determine what’s real is by consensus, by checking in with others. “Did you see that UFO zipping across the sky? No? Well I must have imagined it then.”
Is she actually floating?!? Photo by Ashley Bean on Unsplash
Because of the internet, we can find people who support our version of reality and that’s what Donald Trump does. How ironic that a “reality” TV star has no sense of consensus reality. He’s so used to creating the truth and now he gets to broadcast his reality to the world. He speaks to the seductive idea that the truth can be whatever you want it to be. It can feel empowering to say, “My truth is my truth” and ignore what other people say, especially if a person has experience with not being heard or believed. However, I’m going to quote Stephen Dinan, CEO and founder of The Shift Network, an alternative media company. He writes:
“The good aspect of claiming our own internal truth and authority – which human potential teachings typically promote – turns ugly and becomes a descent into ignorance when people stop respecting the hard-earned disciplines behind so many mainstream endeavors from science to journalism to medicine. Once we stop respecting expertise and the disciplines that inform that expertise, we put ourselves on a path to ignorance.
Precisely. When we tune out all other voices, we become ignorant. It’s what Donald Trump is advocating by withdrawing from the WHO. It’s what he’s advocating when he says people should stop getting tested for COVID-19. Because if you stop getting tested that means you don’t actually have the virus, right? Well, no. It just means that you can pretend everything is fine and delude yourself.
I can tie this in to my spiritual practice because on the one hand, my spiritual teacher advocates for self-realization, for developing intuition and connection to spirit so the internal reality is important. But on the other hand, he also urges us to have discernment, to use our brains when we’re in the world and reject what is irrational. In fact, he says, “Even if a young boy says something logical, it should be accepted. And if the Supreme Creator Brahma says something illogical, it should be rejected as rubbish.”
I dream of a world where we use our brains. A world where we understand our own version of reality is not the only version. A world where we realize it’s important to look at multiple perspectives and take into account what other people are saying. A world where we accept what is logical and reject what is not.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
First of all, I want to say I’m not judging other people for unfriending or unfollowing. There are some people who don’t deserve the pleasure of our company because they cause us harm physically, mentally, or emotionally. I’m using the topic of unfriending as an entry point to discuss a spiritual concept.
In this day and age, it’s easy to surround ourselves solely with people who feel the way we do. Dissolving a friendship is as easy as clicking a button or ignoring a text message. If we don’t like something someone has to say, we don’t have to listen to it. But at what cost?
Click, click, friendship OVER.
I read an article recently about how a liberal professor is terrified by his liberal students. He said, “The student-teacher dynamic has been re-envisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.”
He goes on to say he once saw an adjunct professor not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. The adjunct’s response that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only “fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate,” according to the professor.
What surprised me even more as I read the article was learning Oxford canceled an abortion debate because it would have imperiled the “welfare and safety of our students.” Have we become so obsessed with maintaining comfort that we can’t allow any differences of opinion? That we’re not open to having our ideas questioned?
From a spiritual perspective, when we start cutting ourselves off from others, when we start making judgment calls about who’s right, who’s wrong, and what’s good, what’s bad, we move further away from the divine. If the goal of my life is to experience a sense of one-ness with God, then I can’t practice separateness. My spiritual teacher says those who follow the path of the divine “do not acknowledge the baneful and delusory classifications created by society,” because those classifications contribute to crudeness and staticity, to engaging more with Prakrti than consciousness, which then in turn “speeds unhampered in the innermost recesses of the heart.”
Again, some people deserve to be loved from afar, but they aren’t any less deserving of love and respect. And those who are good people, but who have different opinions from us? There are many treasures to be found in those friendships. I have some dear friends who do not share my views on things like diet and religion, but instead of letting those differences divide us, we work to find our similarities instead. There is something amazing and sublime about finding the ways in which we are the same instead of pointing out how we’re different. And sublime is where I’m at these days.
I dream of a world where we have more tolerance for differences. A world where we seek to find what unites us instead of divides us. A world where we’re not so quick to cut ourselves off from people. A world where we seek one-ness in as many ways as we can.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.