That's Life

Civilized Disagreement, "Social" Media, and the Real Ends of Evil

On occasion I have been unable to resist stating an opinion about a sports figure in response to a YouTube video, or a discussion about evolution on a YouTube video, and I have discovered not only that ad hominem arguments proliferate but that, because of the shield of anonymity — the online ‘mask’ — comments can get quite uncivilized.

Naturally only a fool would expect to carry on a debate in the comments section of a video — or a substack post? — because emotions tend to carry the day and lead people back to the Stone Age of emotional and civilizational development, unless one is fortunate or lucky and a quick to and fro can be held with courtesy.

I spent a lifetime focusing all of my professional attentions as a listener, and if there is anything for which I am profoundly grateful to psychoanalysis, it is for that unparalleled experience of listening, as an analyst, and being listened to as an analytic patient (a requirement to practice psychoanalysis, by the way). To listen for the long stretch of an hour with every faculty and in a way that employs the ‘third ear’ or however one wishes to describe the strange holistic apprehension of someone’s utterances, to listen with every fiber and faculty of one’s being, in the ideal setting.

But the effect of social media and screens is that not only are people not listening, they are not even READING anything beyond a paragraph. I have been astonished by friends who have no time to read a novel anymore, but spend all day long scrolling.

And a consequence of the disinterest in reading anything beyond a few lines is the equally alarming habit of the immediate knowing response — as if an act of divine inspiration routinely leads to the absolutely correct conclusion about virtually everything. Well, we all experienced this on the streets during our youth, when everybody’s opinion was expressed on the spot and, if possible, with force, leading to various degrees of mayhem. But youthful stupidity and arrogance are things to be surmounted by thoughtfulness and scholarship in the passage to maturity.

Instead, Facebook and its ilk have facilitated a wholesale regression to impulsivity and unthinkingness, to a kind of narcissistic orgy of smugness. We are ‘friended’ or ‘unfriended’, we get ‘hearts’ and ‘thumbs up (or down)’, we respond in the moment — like a bunch of silly kids, basically.

The essay, that form of literature mastered by very few, has devolved into a ‘post’ — something current, transient, a blip — instead of a work to be savored, taken in, thought about, and appreciated over time. Great essayists wrote relatively few essays in their lifetimes because of the care and substance required to write them — as opposed to the flippant off-the-cuff bit of whimsy sent out electronically to the ether.

We live in a deluge of posts, chats, tweets, pictures, comments and asides, and I am constantly in amazement when, while visiting my local beach, I see so many people hold that phone aloft to memorialize their presence to their followers and their selves: after all, if you ain’t got proof it didn’t happen …

All of this is by way of a prelude to what I would really like to address in this little essay today, spurred in part by responses to my recent elucidation of a political maneuver, and to an exchange with a friend.

So here are my points.

First, we are all of us sucked up and into the vortex of social media and online presence, at least most of us are. Yes, it’s a way of being connected and garnering news, but in so doing we are subjected to those infantile interactions I allude to above — and more.

This world that absorbs us becomes a world where virtually everything is questionable. For example, I see shocking thumbnails about the dangers of broccoli, and videos about hitherto unknown cures for diseases that are incurable, and the dangers of those cures, and the nonexistence of those diseases, and how one teaspoon a day of something will miraculously melt twenty pounds of belly fat, and how soccer games that haven’t yet been played already have been won … and on and on. I think I can guarantee that I would be able to find viewpoints that are completely at odds for anything, within minutes.

In short, within this haze of overwhelming messaging, I begin to get the impression that nothing is real, nothing is true. An impression that has been strongly pushed by advocates of the gender ‘myth’ wherein gender has become a predilection or choice instead of a biological reality. A man dressed as a woman, in this world, is every bit a woman, and a woman dressed as a man is every bit a man as can be.

Which really isn’t true.

And in the realm of politics, not unlike sports, anything goes even more. Because of the complexities and layers that are unknown and never to be known, it’s very difficult to come to decisively correct conclusions, though in the case of covid I believe my own conclusions are correct: covid itself was never as dangerous as touted, a vaccine was never necessary, lockdowns, masks and distancing were not medically sound, and on and on.

Bear in mind that about half the world would disagree with those pronouncements — notwithstanding the fact that I believe they are true and I have done my best to prove my case, along with many others of course.

So what’s real, what’s true?

Second, the confusion sown about truth and reality, thrown into warp-gear by social media and political propaganda, is itself the sign of something. It has a long history, this movement, and there is a great deal of validity to the questioning of appearances, and to the hidden substance of things — after all, that’s what Freud was all about in essence, that the dreams we dream have meanings beneath their surface. But questioning appearances does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that nothing can be true.

And then I had a sudden thought about the nature of evil. What could be worse than killing large number of people, or subjecting kids to horrors, or to engineering wars and all forms of debasement? Or crucifixion and other tortures? Or, more accurately, what could go hand in glove with such activity?

Rendering a human being incapable or unwilling to make a distinction between truth and falsehood, reality and unreality — creating a new species where all is confusion and everything is relative. Making one gullible and eminently malleable mass of humanity …

Maybe that’s evil at its utmost, at its apex, at its most invincible?

But wait, there’s more!

There’s the matter of nihilism, a subject I addressed in a previous essay, which is where all this confusion leads. In the universe of the nihilist everything turns to trash. Nothing is good, nothing is true, and no argument can ever counter the claims of the nihilist that in the end we are all doomed. Thus, the nihilist is ALWAYS RIGHT. The nihilist brings narcissism to its highest low point, a megalomania of gloom.

Which, in my non-nihilist opinion, cannot be true — or good. That we must fight for the truth and the good is a given, and is almost never easy, and is always ongoing.

That’s just way it is, I’m afraid. That’s life.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

August 2026