Opinion is the wilderness between knowledge and ignorance.
Plato
In #143, titled You don’t need a leftist Joe Rogan, I wrote about the need for fewer middle men and commentators.
I want to expand a little on the noise, the incessant fucking commotion of hollow opinions, takes, clips and sound bites.
In Non-things, Byung Chul Han reminds us that “the Divine is an event of stillness.”
He adds that “hypercommunication, the noise of communication, desecrates the world, profanes it.”
I always come back to the idea that The Truth is being buried, obscured, unable to surface. I believe this to be due, at least in part, to the oppressive nature of hyper-communication.
The cacophony of individual verdicts makes it impossible to truly hear or think.
No one knows anything, and no one can stop talking.
Surrounded by noise, terrified of silence, and yet unable to listen.
From the mundane to the political and everything in between, microphones and cameras are interrogating it.
Everyone wants to win the opinion race.
A hot take is a hot meal.
We are starved for anyone’s point of view other than our own. We consume so much nothingness, anything to keep our thoughts at bay.
Writing on media, Karl Kraus famously pointed out “how noisy everything grows”
I believe we are now addicted to that noise.
We have developed a pathological discomfort with silence, which strikes me as a kind of repression technique for our intuitions. Most people have tuned themselves out completely through constant outside stimuli. What remains is smallness, debris, and miscellanea; a bratty toddler’s opinions.
The microphones have fused with our hands and we can go on forever saying fucking nothing at all.
You will be rewarded so long as you never actually say anything of value. You will be heard, provided that what you say has no real bearing on this world.
A society that cannot think is a society that cannot act.
And this is what we are: babbling children engaged in a contest to see who can be the loudest.
We shun the only thing that could provide us with clarity, we reject the preciousness of silence and its infinite land.
In a poem, I asked: WHEN DOES THE LANGUAGE STOP?
Still waiting for us to learn how to shut the fuck up.
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