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History’s Strangest Suicide
How Western civilization was sacrificed in the chase for advertising revenue
We humans reason primarily by anecdote. We may learn abstractly that air travel is the safest way to get from Point A to Point B, but a sensational media story about an airplane crash will have far more influence on us.
The media, whether it is social or traditional, is therefore a dominant factor in the way we think. Our opinions, beliefs, and emotional responses are largely conditioned by whatever the media feeds us.
In a rational world, the media would feed us things that help us become more thoughtful and informed citizens, more capable of collaborating to address the many serious challenges we face.
Unfortunately we don’t live in a rational world.
Instead, we live in a world given over to empty sensation, and the more sensationalist the better. The consequence is that most people have very distorted views of reality, are far more fearful than they should be (and invariably about the wrong things), and more prone to holding extreme views that are entirely unjustified by all available empirical evidence.
How have we arrived at such a dysfunctional destination?
Our problem begins a long time ago, when mass manufacturing was starting to dominate the consumer goods…
