Sunday 17 January 2016

Social media are the mass media is social media

In the past decade, the social media have become massive, dominant, and many or most of the younger population are addicted - and spend most of their discretionary time connected up.

(Note: in The West, young now implicitly refers to below median age - which means younger than forty-five.)

Does this mean that social media are replacing mass media and user-generated content is overthrowing journalistic manipulations? Is the fact that professional mass media journalism is collapsing as a career (if that is a fact), evidence that the public are coming to their senses and thinking for themselves?

Well - take a look! Has the advent of social media reversed, stopped or in the slightest slowed-up the socio-political trends (away from religion, towards leftism, in favour of ever-more sexual revolution) that were established before social media?

Of course not! These decades long trends are obviously continuing, obviously getting worse!

We need to recall the spiritual warfare we are engaged in; and what is the real nature of 'the game'.

We need to consider whether God, or Satan, would be most pleased by the fact that nearly-everybody spends nearly-all their time connected by and communicating with social media? Would God, or Satan, be most encouraged by this trend?

Those who regard social media as a step in the right direction and hope for the future are deluding themselves with dreams of what might be, rather than insight into what is actually happening en masse - much like those of us, and I was one of them, who said the same thing about the internet leading to a truthful public discourse.

Don't get distracted from the real game, the real battle, the real war - which is spiritual and not of this world.

Accept the possibility (which I regard as near certainty - but you only need to accept it as a possibility...) that these are the end times - the latter days; and that Christians are very probably not going to win in this world, overall, in this dispensation.

But we will (certainly) win in the bigger picture of post-mortal life, and in the long term of eternity (if we are true).

We are not fighting to save 'the world' when the world does not want to be saved - wants not to be saved, and indeed regards the whole topic of Christianity as not just ridiculous but evil.

Our job is not to win an unwinnable war (using enemy troops!) but to win souls - actual, specific people including ourselves!

It looks to me (and I have personal experience of this) that worldly fights to beat secular Leftism on its own ground (i.e. fights to beat them solidly, permanently, in the arena of public discourse) often leads Christians into hard-heartedness, pride, and sometimes hatred when it becomes gradually clear that this kind of victory against overwhelming odds is not possible, and not wanted.

The Christian fight against Secular Leftism is not perceived to be a war of liberating victims from a tyrannical oppressor - because the victims are as corrupted as the oppressors, the victims are willingly victimizing themselves, the oppressed are fighting to stay oppressed because they prefer it.

Leftist oppression is successful at portraying itself as freedom, because the great bulk of Western people do not want to be free - they merely want not to be identified as sinful. They want a nihilistic world view because they don't want divine order.

The Western Masses believe only in this mortal life, and in the reality of the virtual world of the mass media - the modern idea of immortality is not resurrection and life everlasting in the New Jerusalem; but (e.g.) to have one's characteristic brain patterns downloaded onto an unbounded supercomputer. In practice this means that nothing really matters overall and in the long term; nothing is more significant than the latest whatever. 

The Western masses want evil because they have chosen to reject the possibility of good, because good is a constraint, good is not what they personally want now, good must be worked-with and not re-defined, good is a real and heavy personal responsibility. 

All this on average and as a general tendency - and nothing can be done (at least not directly) by you or I to confront, defeat and reverse the big picture of recent history in the modern West.

But our job as Christians is to help those who want to be helped - and to do that means ensuring that we ourselves are a proper example of warm heartedness, courage, love.

If fighting and campaigning is interfering with that - if it is corrupting us personally - then we must stop: we must not do it.

If alliance-building is diluting and clouding and confusing our understanding, or causing anything less than total honesty of Christian seeking and expression - then we must stop: we must not do it.

The end does not justify the means - rather, the end flows from the means.

It is not our job to define the end - but it is our job (and nobody else can do it) to seek and maintain the goodness of our souls. On this matter: No Compromise. 


5 comments:

Valkea said...

Beautifully said, and I notice this corruption in myself too. With too long and intense contact with the distorted liberal world, trying to comprehend it and construct it to a better form, my soul has become like a surrealist painting, where bizarre things pop-up and change shapes, and my commenting has sometimes become like partial snapshots from that painting, strange disruptions on the screen, perhaps largely incomprehensible to readers. I swim in the sewers of the liberal world, and I have become corrupted and my soul becomes destroyed in order to help and save others, so that better men than me can have more leeway and breathing room in this world, and eternal life in the next. May God help us all.

God works in mysterious ways. Strange disruptions jolt people from a stagnation, may tell them something is wrong, and start to build a little foundation for change. But when we search intensely among the surreal, we do find finally also clear, balanced and real pictures. Have you noticed how almost all the two way communication, empathy, love, friendship, helping, mutual understanding and recognition is obstructed between conservatives and liberals, and how this is connected to the way our society is organized, what kind of stunted morality it uses, and what are its fears and goals? There are better way of doing things, and now I know. Like interpreting in my own way the following slightly surreal video, first the souls are disconnected and frozen, its consequence is fire and chaos, but with the power of two way love the final pictures are clear, normal and good. I didnt get this thought from the video, just remembered there is a video which corresponds somewhat to my thought. What disconnection has destroyed, and made evil and surreal, connection is likely to correct, and make normal and good and beautiful. I recently wrote two informative disruptions to Heterodox Academy site, and sometime in the future I will write there a third comment, clear, slightly artistic (thus almost normal, but not quite), realistic, consummate and fulfilled picture, perhaps my last there. I dont expect any reaction or answers to it, but a couple of scientists may get ideas. In the long run small things have big effects. It takes a long time for anything to happen. Patience is necessary.

Every endless night has a dawning day
Every darkest sky has a shining ray
And it shines on you, can't you see
You're the only one who can shine for me

It's a private emotion
That fills you tonight
And a silence falls between us
As the shadows steal the light

When your soul is tired and your heart is weak
Do you think of love as a one way street?
Well, it runs both ways, open up your eyes
Can't you see me here, how can you deny

Every endless night has a dawning day
Every darkest sky has a shining ray
It takes a lot to laugh as your tears go by
But you can find me here till your tears run dry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-m9fn1yeEI

Bruce Charlton said...

@V - Thanks.

I don't know anything about this Ricky Martin or his work - but note that he looks like a darker and more petulent version of England's one-day cricket wicket-keeping superstar Jos Butler.

Valkea said...

I thought about these words still, they remained rolling in my head: "But our job as Christians is to help those who want to be helped - and to do that means ensuring that we ourselves are a proper example of warm heartedness, courage, love.

If fighting and campaigning is interfering with that - if it is corrupting us personally - then we must stop: we must not do it.

If alliance-building is diluting and clouding and confusing our understanding, or causing anything less than total honesty of Christian seeking and expression - then we must stop: we must not do it.

It is not our job to define the end - but it is our job (and nobody else can do it) to seek and maintain the goodness of our souls."

... And you are right. I have to change. Social and personal Christian goals cannot be achieved without it. It has to start by reducing liberal and other media use. At the same time I have to become less disruptive commenter too.

as said...

People now try to forge serious relationships (marriage) through social media. There's been a proliferation of phone dating apps (Tinder, Coffee meets Bagel, Zoosk).

Bruce Charlton said...


@as - I have become convinced that a system of primily parental choice (with a veto from participants) is probably the best basis of marriage

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-science-of-sex-most-important.html

Individual men and women are not equipped to make wise choices, unaided. In practice this means that the primary (although not final) choice must often be out of their hands - as was original and natural to Men. This is the consensus of human history.

Individuals are seldom able to choose their own spouses in isolation from a community which provides reputational background knowledge on the other person and is or her family, over a period of time - and which takes into account long term aspects.