The Death of Imagination

The Buddha points to the moon, and the Twitiot criticizes the finger pointing at it.

One thing I’m noticing about all the Twitter brigading on my pictures is just how easy it is to provoke a basic emotional response in a majority of hate-followers.

The first Maxim of the Internet: Never use allegory, metaphor, hyperbole, sarcasm, or prose. Whatever can be taken literally will be taken literally. All art of language, all subtlety of expression, will be wasted on minds trained to react to 45-second video clips in 280 characters or less. Your witty haiku or attempts at parable only engender contempt for having forced the average reader to spend more than a minute trying to understand what you were implying.

Unless their deliberate misunderstanding is your goal, avoid $10 words. In fact, avoid $4 words. The old KISS rule – ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ – has been revised to ‘Keep It Stupid-Simple.’ Sometimes deliberate confusion is the intent. But even this will be misinterpreted because the average mind is too consumed by dissecting the literalness of the metaphor to appreciate its own mocking. Use any story that is supposed to be analogous to whatever point you’re making, and they will use the scantest minutiae to resist ever grasping the point. They don’t want to understand it. And the easiest way to effect that is to focus on how you tried to convey it rather than the perspective itself.

There are really two aspects to this resistance; the need to feel connected and affirmed and the need to feel like they’re doing something by telling you, “You suck, what a baby.” Twitter is never going to be the place to actually change anyone’s mind about anything, so don’t try. It’s not for intellectual discourse or an exchange of ideas, it’s strictly for shitposting and middle-school taunting. Social media is actually a social experiment in gauging just how autistic most people really are and how willing they are to reduce themselves to point & sputter reactions. 

I used to think that Twitter could be used for other purposes than flinging shit at one another. When the 280-character limit was instituted, I thought, “Ah, now people will actually get what I’m telling them.” I also thought Tweeting threads was a good idea to make sure people would get my point. No, just no. Mediocre minds don’t want that. In fact, they’ll hate you for making them take the mental effort to deduce what you meant. They don’t want their minds changed (as if that were possible). They want short, pithy one-liners that affirm their beliefs and tribal affiliations. Short quips offer them an opportunity to broadcast how smart they are for holding those beliefs and belonging to those tribes. They want the girls in the social media schoolyard to think they’re cool. If they can get their egos affirmed in the same reply, so much the better. 

I’ve often said the only way to test the strength of an idea is in the crucible of open debate. 

“Crucible?” What the fuck is that? 

However, social media was never intended to be a medium for the exchange of ideas or information. It’s neither a marketplace of ideas nor a forum of debate. Every article or data set cited to establish a premise is expected to be criticized by an opposing belief. The preknowledge of an impending critical review by a literalist mindset (bordering on autism) decides the way the initial point is presented. It’s not enough to simply quote data. It must be presented in the context of pandering to the sensibilities of a readership that defaults to literalism to protect their ego. Ideas and innovations live and die by a process of gaffs and missteps in offending this literalism. To be relevant, writers and thinkers accommodate their ideas to the literalists’  framework. This then becomes a feedback loop until the test subjects run the experiment, and the literalists effectively write the article or present the information for themselves through the author.

Of course, all these facts and data are cherry-picked to confirm a specific belief set – or at least that’s the default presumption. Bias, or the suspicion of bias, is always baked into the data. Even the fact that you presented the data at all is evidence of bias. 

“What is this guy trying to sell me by bringing up this research?”

Today, when you make an assertion, nothing less than 10 peer-reviewed meta-analyses of research independently funded by reputable institutions at major universities will do to even start the debate process. None of which will change anyone’s mind. Because no one forms beliefs or values or even best practices based on exhaustive, probably biased, quantitative research. It’s not for a lack of intelligence or willful ignorance. It’s just easier to dismiss a premise that would force us to reassess our identities than devote the effort needed to wrap our heads around it. It’s intellectual lethargy that makes us doubters. For a generation raised on instant access to information, literalism is the tool of choice to justify that ego-protecting laziness. The Buddha points to the moon, and the literalist criticizes the finger pointing at it. 

The moment you present them with anything that conflicts with a belief they’ve invested their ego in, that’s when they devolve into Point & Sputter. They revert to their intellectual level type.

So, what to do about Twitter? Only use the platform as an advertising vehicle? The blog or Substack is where the real discussion begins. Even then, people won’t read it – “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”  but more will than on Twitter for sure. Hell, Zoomers even get upset when I link a blog post on Twitter. It forces them into a contract to read it if they want to debate the premise I based it on. They’re offended that I would dare to ask them to read an essay I wrote instead of engaging with them in a one-on-one exchange that invariably begins and ends with their confidence in their ignorance. It’s much easier to dismiss a challenge to their belief set by presuming the only reason I’d challenge them is to sell more books. 

In a social order based on emotionalism, you cannot present a fact or a data set without telling people how to feel about it. It’s not enough to show the results or the numbers in the conclusion; you must explain to people what you want them to feel in revealing the findings. If you don’t, people will hate you for it, even if the data aligns with their personal beliefs. If you don’t tell them how to feel, they will interpret and infer what they think you want them to feel – good or bad – and they will hate you for making them do the interpreting and inferring for you. They’re forced to make an effort to rebuild their identities (or reinforce them if they agree with you) by picking apart ‘what you really meant’ when the point you made, the data you cited, conflicts with their ego-invested beliefs.

We often read critics of either ideological stripe bemoan the lack of originality in our art, our music, and most certainly, our movies. Old franchises suffer from Woke narratives smuggled into stories that should never have been revived. Nostalgia is the only thing that motivates moviegoers now because we really have no new stories to tell. We’re only entertained by ‘content creators’, influencers, and the next series to watch on Netflix, Hulu, Apple Plus, Paramount, Max, and Amazon Prime. 

But the Woke left and the TradCon right both suffer from the same affliction — a lack of imagination. That lack of imagination was caused by the death of allegory, metaphor, hyperbole, parable, myth, sarcasm, poetry, and the woodcraft to express it — all replaced by an autistic literalism needed to protect the egos of lazy, mediocre minds.