Intolerant bubbles

“Humans have the incredible ability of knowing and simultaneously not knowing. Rather, to put it better, they may know something if they really think about it, but most of the time they do not think about it and thus, do not know it,” Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” For example, they are aware that every sensitive issue that attracts the attention of the public in these fluid and troubled times is grasped as an opportunity for acute anti-government rhetoric and fruitless political confrontations. But they do not consider this in the din of ideological warfare, and they forget the crux, that is political contributing in searching for immediate solutions and the greater good. Substance and incendiary ideological conflicts do not go side-by-side for long. A different example: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supporters tend to overlook the lie that Russia was attacked and acted in self-defense, using a higher truth as a pretext; that the West is poaching parts from Russia’s whole and setting up “made-up countries,” like Ukraine. This is a doctrine that entraps populations in yet another intolerant, fantasy bubble.

The use of rhetoric that ignores reality and is based on a deliberately distorted version of events proliferates in times of particularly tense political atmospheres, like the one prevailing around us these days, with its focal points being the energy crisis, the wiretapping case, and the refugees in Evros. These are days of crass political theater, like the excesses of the opposition in decrying the efficacy of vaccines, using the Covid-19 infection of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla as a launching point. Criticism becomes the dynamite that tears everything apart, both the important and the unimportant, turning it into an incendiary paste.

Deliberate oversimplifications, toxicity and aggression are all obstacles to finding political consensus on difficult national issues like the migrant crisis and the Turkish battering ram. They cloud the judgment of many citizens, affecting them to the extent where they lose their faith in justice and democracy. Elements of society in times of crisis and volatility react online with ample contradictions, discontinuities, randomness, obscurity. They are attracted by excess. They are mesmerized by sparkles and lean toward the mud that perpetuates confusion, division and fanaticism. They also tend be in denial, that is to not really think, and thus, while knowing, they do not know.