misplaced idealism about the human condition

Ever since the emergence of homo sapien’s higher consciousness humans have lived so much in their heads. The most obvious manifestation of that is religion: gods in heavens doing things and having thoughts. But it applies in general to much of human life. Ideologies; some of them batshit crazy.

There’s an interesting phenomenon re: idealism about the human condition. Over-idealism always leads to disappointment. That was the case with the Enlightenment. In recent years there was an idealism when television got going after WWII: “Culture into living rooms all over the country.” Within fifteen years an alarm was being sounded: “Oh my god, the thing has become a vast wasteland.”

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm

There was an idealism when the internet got going during the eighties and nineties. “Democratization of information.” Now: “Oh my god, what a zoo of incivility, rancor, misinformation, malinformation, alienation, distraction, and overwhelm.”

https://medium.com/@stevenwelzer/cyberspace-is-the-new-heaven-ede893d44544

In the modern period, phenomena like television and the internet reflect the collective pathology of mass society and mass psychology.