Why are people so eager to accept what they see and hear on the internet as truth without checking facts, or even the credentials of the source? The short answer is because they are unable to discern truth, and the long answer is we are creating a new vulnerability in the advent of social media.

Long, long ago society looked to the most learned of scholars to guide their thinking: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, John F. Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher — well you get the point. For centuries, scholars studied their predecessors and applied a system of critical thinking before they conveyed their conclusions to society for the benefit of all mankind. Intelligence grew with each generation.

Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century compared us to dwarfs perched on the shoulder of giants in his attempt to explain the significance of the collection of wisdom while identifying the limitations of relying on one’s own ability to perceive and understand from a minimal vantage point. We see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.

Nowadays social media has all but eliminated this ideal and has created a stage upon which small-minded people purport their limited perceptions as the wisest of all truths. Ignoring centuries of collective wisdom, these limited views are now passed through invisible waves of communication to the vast majority who seem like little birds with gaping mouths eager to consume anything that is dropped into their tiny beaks. The scariest aspect is that the least educated recipients of such unfounded, false information and propaganda are quickly becoming the most influential people of our time as they forward such garbage on to everyone they know in their contact list. The world’s source of wisdom is quickly turning upside-down.

Propaganda is written and distributed by felons, social misfits and other angry twisters-of-truth, and outright pathological liars. They exacerbate the problems in society, never the solutions. What doom awaits us all if we fail to pay attention to our giant scholars and instead absorb the angry words of propagandists which serve to destroy mutual respect and closes the hearts and minds of us all with its angry rhetoric to which our fears attract us to abandon? We must stop this atrocity lest we all be doomed to the limited perception of angry dwarfs.

Susan Carlson Joyce

Albert Lea