misplaced idealism about the human condition

Steven Welzer
1 min readJul 16, 2024

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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.

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Steven Welzer
Steven Welzer

Written by Steven Welzer

A Green Party activist, Steve was an original co-editor of DSA’s “Ecosocialist Review.” He now serves on the Editorial Board of the New Green Horizons webzine.

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