Several months ago, I was talking with my baby brother who told me he had taken a break from social media.
His reason?
The polemics and diatribes were becoming too toxic for his taste.
My brother is only 21 and he arrived at that conclusion on his own.
Prior to my conversation with him, I had been thinking about the same thing.
Why is there so much polarization on the internet?
In his 1994 book, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into New Nationalism, Canadian journalist, Michael Ignatieff made the following remarks about the conflicts in former Yugoslavia.
“Freud once argued that the smaller the real difference between two people, the larger it is bound to loom in their imagination. He called this effect the narcissism of minor differences. Its corollary must be that enemies need each other to remind themselves of who they really are. A Croat, thus is someone who is not a Serb. A Serb is someone who is not a Croat. Without hatred for the other, there would be no clearly defined national self to worship and adore.”
One thing the internet and social media has done is to reduce the differences between people.
Nowadays, once you have a smart phone and internet connection, you share a single, unifying characteristic with billions of others: You become similar to others in that you now have access to people in ways that had never been possible in the world.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, the Arab Spring in the early 2010s and the more recent EndSARS movement have been successful in toppling autocratic governments and police brutality because of this very unifying characteristic.
However, mankind has long since learned to abuse his God-given capacity for imitation and worship.
As a result, there’s a fertile ground where Michael Ignatieff’s theory can grow unhindered.
Since the vast majority of people do not imitate God, they have no real sense of self.
This isn’t surprising because, as the Prophet Jeremiah concluded, it is not in man to know himself!
In a bid to cure this itch for self-identity in the midst of unprecedented similarity, man strives to look for anything that can serve as a distinguishing factor between him and others.
You know that itch. It’s the same thing that plays out when you try to decide on which brand of cereal you are going to buy. In this state, you ignore the similarities between the brands and only look for differences!
Hence my conclusion that every diatribe, polemic or polarizing take on the internet is the result of man’s desperate search for self-identification as he drowns in the sea of overwhelming similarity with others.