Internet insularity

This article discusses how the internet has enabled Ron Paul's campaign to reach a level of hype far beyond its true significance. However, it's also a good starting-point to consider another phenomenon which has concerned me for a long time. Here's the closing:

How can we explain Ron Paul? This is a big country with hundreds of millions of people, some of whom are attracted to quirky, anti-establishment candidates. And some of those people are angry, looking for an outspoken leader and searching for an easy answer to the nation's problems. But there simply are not all that many of them. The Internet undoubtedly has made it easier for Paul supporters to connect with the campaign and with each other, and it's become a terrific way to raise cash for a candidate with emotional followers. But Web chatter, declarations of undying support on Facebook and even surprising fundraising totals don't make a serious contender out of a candidate from the political fringe.

What he's talking about here is something which we're all, to a greater or lesser extent, susceptible to. The internet makes it very, very easy to seek out fellow-bloggers and news sources which agree fairly closely with one's own political or social or religious views. It's easy to become part of a crowd who all agree with each other, and to draw information about the world mostly from people who agree as well.

This is comfortable, but it can be dangerous. In the first place, if you rarely hear opposing views expressed and make an effort to consider them seriously, you can drift into a frame of mind where opposing views seem so alien and bizarre to you that anyone who defends them must be stupid, insane, brainwashed, or acting from malevolent ulterior motives. After all, every website you read and everyone who posts comments on your blog agrees with you; who are they, those strange creatures off in the distance who actually take a completely different position?

In the second place, it can make you think that your own view of the world is far more widespread than it actually is. This problem existed before the internet, of course -- "How could that guy win the election when nobody I know voted for him?" -- but most of us understand that the people we know personally are a small, local, self-selected group which is very unlikely to be representative of society at large. With the internet, you're dealing with such a large number of people in such widespread locations that, for many people at least, it's apparently a lot harder to keep that in mind. Quite often, those whose views are in fact shared by only small minorities are convinced that they represent a substantial chunk of the population. After all, the internet has let them meet so many others who think the same way!

Sorry, but the reason Giuliani and Clinton have been topping the polls for months is that that's where the country's political center of gravity is. Kucinich, Brownback, Paul, and so forth have been heard. The reason they aren't getting anywhere is that most of their views are not shared by most of the public, even if everyone you know is fervently enamored of one of these candidates.

Faced with crushing disappointments from objective reality, in the form of poll or election results, it's easy to take solace in what I call the "people are sheep" mentality. I am part of a small, well-informed, thoughtful elite who understand the real picture, but the great herd masses out there are "sheeple" -- apathetic, passive, easily led, brainwashed by "the media", who now apparently have powers much like those of the evil wizards who in animist societies are thought to be behind everything bad that happens. That's why 97% of the electorate didn't vote for the guy I support.

I can claim rather more understanding of the "people are sheep" mentality than most can, because for fifteen years out of my life I identified with a particular ideological/philosophical movement which explicitly encouraged its adherents to think this way and to consider themselves an elite minority elevated above the slavish common herd. (In fact, they contained a much higher proportion of sociopaths, racists, emotionally-damaged control freaks, and miscellaneous crackpots than the general population.) Over time, though -- aside from the fact that most people who feel such a need to constantly assert their status as an elite superior to the "herd" are painfully-obviously nothing of the sort -- I could not avoid realizing that this simply did not reflect the reality of the world I saw around me. Most people are not so easily led unless it's in a direction they already want to go, for reasons of their own. At least in a developed and relatively-educated society like ours, most people have grounds for their beliefs which, even if they are wrong or illogical, can't be reduced to stupidity or brainwashing. The world is more complicated than that.

As an aside, being convinced that everyone who disagrees with you must be a media-brainwashed idiot can make you a rather nasty person. I saw other people who were like that, and I saw the same tendencies developing in myself.

Getting back to my main point, I fear that the internet is exacerba-ting the natural tendency of people to withdraw into encapsulated groups where everyone agrees with everyone else, which they then think are the world, or most of the world, or the only sane part of the world. This can be avoided, but it takes some conscious effort. My own regular political reading includes National Review, Michelle Malkin, Samizdata, Andrew Sullivan, and a wide range of bloggers whose opinions I don't agree with a large percentage of the time. This can cause aggravation, but it's necessary. The same applies even with flat-out enemies. Why do I focus on Islam so much? I have two university degrees in Islamic civilization, and was working on a third in the same subject when I decided that I couldn't stomach academia any more and quit. It's because of that level of knowledge about Islam that I came to understand how supremely dangerous it is.

That doesn't mean I'm eager to engage in arguments at all times with all comers; quite the opposite. Readers may have noticed that I almost never engage with questions like why I support abortion rights or why I don't believe in God. This is partly because I've already put in years of debating those issues, and quite frankly I'm burned out on it. In most cases, people who do want to engage with those questions have already done a very good job of stating the case (as with Black Sun Journal's page on global-warming denialism), and rather myself wearily rehashing what they have already done, I prefer to refer challengers to them and have done with it. Right now I'm much more interested in how the goals I support can be achieved than in going back over why I support them -- so that's what I write about.

But if you actually want to understand things like religion or the anti-abortion crusade -- even if only for the practical purpose of fighting against them more effectively -- they you need, at least occasionally, to read what they themselves have to say, in their own words. Otherwise you won't even be able to write about them and make sense.