THOUGHTS IN BRIEF
Once, information promised to be the solution to all our problems. Many moons ago, the chirping and birring tones of the dial-up connection excited us with the allure of the world wide web; a place of endless pages of information, where every question could be answered. Very soon, however, as the internet expanded at breakneck speed out beyond the infinite horizon of cyberspace and as the virtual world underwent a population explosion, we found ourselves drowning in a bottomless ocean of information. It did not have the hoped-for effect. Limitless information did not solve our problems, it simply created more problems.
What the philosophers had always known became apparent to us; that while we might have more technology in the palm of our hands than was available to the scientists who first put a man in space, we remain unchanged — highly evolved apes possessed by the frantic search for cheap rewards and instant gratification. Information was dumped on us like the weaponised disclosure of files to the defence by a prosecution playing hard-ball. Such an excess of information was of no more use to us than the blueprints of an atomic energy plant to a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Perplexed and confused, we learned to survive by ignoring the information.
Ultimately, we became blind to information. Personal opinion, as something sensual and passionate, as something ego-affirming and territorial, quickly gained primacy for the majority as a fortification against the power grab of a new priestly class of information technicians and specialists. This doctrine of the infallibility of personal opinion locked the largest fraction of the human population into an intellectual dungeon of alternative facts and self-serving irrationalities; making us for the first time in human history a species hostile even to the basic information we need for survival. Information overload gave rise to the true idiocracy of the masses.
We do not need information. We do not need naked information. What we need is what we have always needed — understanding. Information without understanding is toxic, it is inimical to the human mind. Our authentic existence is not, as life on social media would have us imagine, an endless quiz show requiring a continuous stream of correct answers as bits of useless — naked — information. Our happiness and indeed our survival depends not so much on these correct answers as it does on the meaning of these answers. Understanding provides us with meaning, and this is the only solution to the anxiety of a world of nihilistic and meaningless information.
Jason Michael McCann M.Phil.
Biblical Studies and Hebrew
Race, Ethnicity, and Conflict
Unprecedented Times 