The Mueller investigation revealed that angry people are easy to manipulate

Getting sucked into the insanity of the Mueller investigation (May 17, 2017 – March 22, 2019) was like getting sucked into an ancient myth. One minute you’re living your life, next minute you’re a character in Homer’s Odyssey. Were we not, like Odysseus’s men, turned into swine? Were we not, like Odysseus, bewitched? Did we not lose track of time, trumping till two, night after night? Waking up this past weekend, after a thoroughly unhealthy, year-and-a-half-long obsession with American politics, I felt like disoriented Odysseus, coming to his senses on the Island of Ogygia.

Angry people are incredibly easy to manipulate. Same is true of the self-righteous. The more “political” you become, the more you become a mere pawn in someone else’s chess game. Your ideas are no longer your own. They’re not even your friends’ ideas. They are, instead, prefabricated ideas, manufactured by spin-doctors, mad scientists of the spirit, who understand human nature better than most, and are practiced in the art of deception.

These master manipulators understand that the pleasures of politics may be ugly pleasures, but they’re pleasures nonetheless. Anger feels good. Self-righteousness feels good. But these pleasures come at a cost. Politics erodes your creativity far more than it erodes your humanity. I can’t believe how boring we’ve become! Thinking prefabricated ideas all the time is sort of like moving into a prefabricated suburban row house. You get to choose the drapes, what color to paint the walls, little else. Rarely in my lifetime has tuning out completely, and shunning all news, been so tempting.

Trashing journalists and journalism has been a mainstay of Western intellectual life at least as far back as Nietzsche, who implored his readers to “live in ignorance of what seems most important to your age!” Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Aaron Haspel, thinkers I’ve profited from immensely, are similarly hard on the media. Taleb’s contempt for journalists is legendary. In The Bed of Procrustes (2016) he says that he takes “a ritual bath after any contact, or correspondence (even emails), with . . . journalists, and those in similarly depraved pursuits”—whilst Haspel quips in Everything(2015): “News is noise.”

If the citizenry buys into the idea that journalism is little more than propaganda, and journalists are little more than paid trolls, who benefits from this, if not paid trolls and people like Sean Hannity, who can now afford to hide in plain sight, with get-out-of-jail-free cards in their wallets which read: “Everybody’s Doing It Why Can’t We?” Same is true of those who denigrate science: they’re usually doing so because serious science is a threat to their particular brand of bullshit.

There are those who maintain that media isn’t about truth, it’s about power. It’s a popular view these days. But I don’t buy it. Is media often about power? Absolutely. Too often? Probably. But there’s still a world of difference between the New York Times and the propaganda machines that masquerade as media outlets in totalitarian states like North Korea and the former Soviet Union. There’s still a world of difference between Peter Jennings and Alex Jones.

I read Adbusters religiously in my early twenties, and I was a bible-thumping Pentecostal in my teens, so I know full well why folks on the far left and the far right are in love with this false equivalency. They love it because it levels the playing field. After all, if news is nothing but propaganda, and it’s all just about power, then we can spew out our own bullshit with impunity, and we can do it with a clean conscience.

Removing a well-established institution like the media from your society is like getting a seemingly superfluous part of your body, like your appendix or your tonsils, surgically removed. We too often discover the usefulness of things like the tonsils after they’ve been irretrievably removed. So, before you entrust the body politic to the radical’s knife, it’s good to ask: Is this institution performing an important function? And, if it is, what’s going to perform it after it’s gone?

Maybe Mueller’s nothing burger is the last straw for you. Maybe you’re ready and willing to burn the mainstream media to the ground now. Because you’re sure that anything could be better than this. Maybe you fancy yourself a gifted gardener with a flawless five-year plan for humanity? If so, bear in mind that most of the planned societies of the last century led to the Gulag not the Garden. Maybe you’re a laissez-faire libertarian, with a flair for creative destruction, who wants to burn the forest down just to see what comes up of its own accord. If so, bear in mind that societies with weak institutions are notoriously unstable.

These days, any simpleminded partisan with a political ax to grind can find an online community of like-minded whack-jobs who’ll happily Facebook-like every stupid thing he says. Communities of this kind aren’t just safe spaces for stupid; they’re boot camps for bullshit that provide budding ideologues with plenty of ideological ammunition (e.g., bogus stats, pre-fab arguments, etc.). Before long, what was once a more-or-less harmless, single-issue troll has morphed into something far more monstrous and formidable: a veritable Swiss-army knife of bullshit, a perfect storm of bad ideas, a walking Wikipedia of stupid.

There are those who see this as a kind of progress, as a perfect example of the democratization of knowledge in the Information Age. But I think it’s more like giving nuclear weapons to a crazy little country run by coked-up child soldiers. Regardless, what’s done is done, and there’s no turning back: the genie’s out of the bottle. These Frankenstein creations of the internet are now, as they will continue to be for quite some time, a major obstacle to 21st-century Enlightenment. To keep your head in the years to come, you’ll need to cultivate two things: an ideologically-diverse newsfeed. And a taste for nothing burger.