Hell is other people

I was reading a post by Flying Rodent today, taking as his starting point an admittedly barking mad article by some right wing loony in America, claiming the ever disintegrating and redundant American left were engineering some sort of communist conspiracy to take over American life. I would find any suggestion that there is life in the very dead duck of socialism in the pond of American politics as to be little more than laughable; this article suggest not only is the duck breathing, but it's snapping the bread out of your hand, before going off to jack a Warburton's delivery van. It makes you wonder how someone like that can misread the world so badly, and how they manage to do simple every day tasks like order a beer.

But the point RD reaches is that writers, articles and websites full of this material pop up all the time - screeds and screeds of mindless, uninformed rubbish. Many had hopes that the internet would help bring into being a better system of news. Instead what we have is idiots cordoning themselves off into little online ghettos, and throwing bricks at anyone they disagree with. The problem of course is that if you do this, you just get dumber by the second.

That said, I'm not too bothered about it. Why? Because people have always been mad. In my line of work I have to talk to people who share a very different world view from my own. Think of the all the concious and unconscious decisions they would have to have made to get where they are, across that desk fro me. What are the chances I will be able to convince them that what they did was wrong, and that their reasoning behind their actions was wrong? Oh, I can get them to admit they are dishonest in a legal sense, but for most of the people I deal with, the law is pretty arbitrary. It's one thing to change someone's mind on one small instance of technicality - it's another to persuade someone their view of the world is skew-wiff. You are arguing against someone's learned life experience.

But you know what - many of the people I get in into that interview room I can get on with. Why? Because sometimes we both realize that it's just a human being sat across from us - flawed, sure - but human nonetheless. We talk football, weather, kids - you know, normal boring stuff. Not because we are interested, but because we don't want to be thought of as a total arsehole, we want to be liked, even in a small way. Little civilities like this are very important in our day to day life. If a boring old man starts havering away to us at a bus stop, we laugh and smile politely and look hopefully down the road. But we don't tell him to piss off.

Online, we flame each other without giving it second thought. We find people with similar opinions to our own with ease. There is no social barriers holding our behaviour back. All of which leads me to the following conclusion; the internet allows us to speak and behave as we wish to each other, but this is behavior most would not dare act out in public. Even those who quake in fear of the communist uprising in America can still politely order a beer without worrying if the barman is a closet red. Pre-internet we could live in ignorant bliss of these people's ignorance, now we can't. But it was probably always there.