As IF Times

link:  https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/pretty-weird-facebook-starts-sending-extremist-content-warnings-to-users_3883194.html?v=ul

The big side benefit of childhood is that any and all major decisions affecting your day to day life needs are taken care of by others, usually parents.  As you get older, you appreciate in hindsight that the mundane necessities of life were automatically in place without any effort or input from you at all.  No need to worry about what to eat, where to live, and all of the usual creature comforts of life including toilet paper and clean clothes were provided for.

The flip side to this benign life is that you have little influence on these very things that are presented to you as conveniences. If you didn’t happen to like liver and onions for dinner, or living in a double wide, it was too bad.  It wasn’t until mid-adolescence that the inner urge to express your own choices became overwhelming and the urge to pull away from the dictates of parents needed to be addressed.  We could date girls with tattoos, go to late night bars and even buy sketchy tech IPO’s.

In the past few generations in western societies, this natural need for people to break free from the tethers of childhood has been eclipsed by an acceptance of protracted adolescence.  Sadly, the arrival of affluence has made people more risk averse and unwilling to cross natural life milestones.  The overbearing mother has taken a place of significant prominence in western society.  Through many generations of subtle and now not so subtle coercion, the role of males has been overshadowed by the smothering mother.

We may have noticed the predilection towards ‘safety’ in whatever we do these days and thus, the avoidance of all things unsafe is paramount in our activities.  It’s hard to quantify if the world has actually become so unsafe in recent generations that it’s necessary to place ‘safety’ above all else in our lives. Add lawyers to that and now you have a recipe for a neutered society.

In our pre-adolescent years, we were advised to avoid activities or people that were likely to compromise our ‘safety’. With the coming of age, we made our own decisions on such things for ourselves.  In our modern information era, the ubiquitous social platforms have taken it upon themselves to be our permanent nannies by directing us against undesirable information….you know, to be safe.

It’s the greatest irony that living in a ‘free society’ actually creates the environment for a controlled population.  The ‘free exchange’ of information that we notionally have access to on-line for example has been used as a tool to impose conformity among those who profess to seek independence of thought.  In fact, the on-line community is high school writ on a grotesque scale.  Coercion of views is so powerful that it’s as if you were escaping from the Scientologists if you dared to have opposing views from accepted norms.

Now we have official corporate nannies guiding your views, as your mother may have done during your childhood. As the linked article notes, we are warned off by the Facebook nannies if we even consider consuming views not of the accepted narrative. In fact such views are labelled as extremist.  YouTube has also implemented such guidance as well as other popular platforms such as Instagram who warn you of “unverified” sources.  This is the present day version of “eat your broccoli” by the mom surrogates of the online world. We are coerced to stay away from people who dare to even talk about things not approved for civilized people; the adult version of don’t hang out with the boy down the street with long hair who spends his days playing music.

As people move from adolescence, the constraints of behavior and thought imposed by their parents dissipate as they move on to their own sense of self. It’s called growing up.  We are now in a novel phase of civilization wherein people refuse to grow up and instead live in a world of protracted adolescence. A society that promulgates pre adolescent conformity will result in one in which only a handful of savvy adults will control them.

There’s an old saying that life imitates art…or is it art imitates life?  In any case, that expression needs to be updated to reflect modern sensibilities, so that now, life imitates a mental asylum.

As is the case with art and life, reality has now blurred sufficiently in modern society that the word ‘satire’ has no relevant place in portraying events. Once the domain of comics and pundits, biting satire has been commandeered by notional journalists to such a degree that The Babylon Bee is as much an information source as a national news outlet such as the CBC, shown in the headline above.

The product of ‘news’ organizations has metastasized from being merely laughable to knee slappingly ridiculous.  And yet, they still have an audience.  I equate this to the consumption of alcohol.  After steady overconsumption of hard liquor, it takes more and more of the stuff to have any effect on the user.  As time goes by and consumption levels increase, the quality of the product becomes immaterial. Thus, we equate modern news with moonshine.  They’re both crudely made and if taken in great quantities, can render you blind and dumb.

I don’t know who the audience is for mainstream news anymore, but they have put lots of comics out of work. There appears to be an internal contest among the industry to see who can create the most guffaw inducing stories.

Despite all that we know of news organizations, people still defer to popular ‘news’ outlets as sources of information.  Social scientists such as Stanley Milgram have demonstrated that social pressure will create conformity, thus, though news stories may be preposterous, if a community absorbs a viewpoint, it becomes very difficult for individuals to push back.

A classic experiment by psychologist Solomon Asch done in conjunction with a TV show, Candid Camera, comically demonstrated this phenomenon. A subject enters an elevator where everyone else is facing the back of the cubicle.  Surprisingly (or not) a large number of subjects also decide to face the back of the elevator upon entering.

In this spirit, news stories are free to publish virtually any kind of preposterous headlines in the knowledge that the chances are good that a segment of the public will accept it as fact.  We don’t have to look too far for examples, since the recent Covid hysteria is the elevator ruse writ on a grand scale.

Even worse, it’s not just actions which are being influenced by corrupted media, it is also necessary to shape thought.  In the example headline above, (and not made up) it is not sufficient to avoid relief from discomfort, it is also necessary to feel great shame if unable to resist the urge for relief.  “Well, I’ll feel better, but I won’t like it”.  This is exactly the same mindset pushed by the white guilt narrative pushed by those pushing “Critical Race Theory”.

So now, we have pressures created by the media to conform to a narrative which is patently preposterous but which is widely propagated.  When pushed, no one actually believes a lot of the narrative, but it’s too much trouble to push back.  This reluctance to push back is responsible for the continuing security Kabuki at airports and will likely engender mask wearing far into the future even after Covid falls into the dustbin of the histories of delusion.

The old joke goes that a man was mopping the floor underneath another man who was hanging by his arms from the ceiling rafters in a mental institution because he thought he was a light bulb.  Two orderlies come to take the man down from the rafters and take him to his room.  The man mopping follows them and continues mopping.  The orderlies ask why the man followed them.  The man replies, “the light’s better here”.