Social Media as Heroin?  Thom Hartmann on Today’s Politics of Rage

Yesterday we meditated on the wonderful work of artist Lily Yeh to organize the oppressed from the bottom up, i.e., beginning with the children, and uplift all of us by way of building community through joint art projects.  Beauty unites and beauty heals.  Her work was celebrated this month in her TED talk.  

I linked her vocation to the words of Jesus in the “Our Father” prayer which, taken from his original Aramaic language, means to utilize our “fiery hearts and willing hands” to work for bringing about the unity of the kingdom/queendom of God on Earth.  One of peace and justice, joy and beauty.

Today I want to salute another worker/thinker of our day whose vocation I admire, Thom Hartmann.  He too, as a journalist and writer, is using his work and “fiery heart and willing hands” to critique falsity and to spread information that can feed a healthier world.   

In a recent and very important article entitled “Is Social Media This Generation’s Heroin?” he proposes that social media itself is a kind of heroin or addiction invented in our time that delivers rage in the name of politics the world over.  Its effect is thus not only to dumb down our species in a time of earth peril and other perils but adds to the problem rather than providing a solution.

His argument is built on recent psychological and historical studies of how and why addiction readily takes over the human brain.  He cites  psychologist and neuroscientist, Kurt Gray, on the role fear plays in our evolutionary survival.  Animal predators were everywhere in the early times of humanity and we became “hard-wired to detect threats quickly and to stay fixated on places where threats once appeared, even after they have vanished.”  This prominence of fear in our psyches still rules.

As Hartmann puts it: If you could invent a drug that would cause people to be fearful—and thus stimulate the rage that comes from fear—you could have incredible control over a population if you could simply tell them where and against whom to direct that fear-induced rage.

Social media has invented that drug: It is algorithms.  Secretly, they purify and concentrate hate and fear spreads across the broader social media site, distilling the most potent memes and messages to the top and shoving them into people’s brains.

The result is that by increasing our individual levels of fear and rage, they create a broader social sense of fear and rage, making these emotions far more easy to exploit.*  

To be continued

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* Thom Hartmann, “Is Social Media This Generation’s Heroin?” The Hartmann Report, December 26, 2024

And Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood for Our Time.

And Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine.

And Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society.

And Fox, Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election.

Banner image: Addicted to cell phones. Photo by Stefan Klauke on Flickr.

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Queries for Contemplation

Do you recognize your work and vocation as your effort to bring your fiery heart and willing hands to critique evil and to create a world that is more just and beautiful and sustainable?

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Recommended Reading

The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time

Thomas Aquinas said, “To live well is to work well,” and in this bold call for the revitalization of daily work, Fox shares his vision of a world where our personal and professional lives are celebrated in harmony–a world where the self is not sacrificed for a job but is sanctified by authentic “soul work.”
“Fox approaches the level of poetry in describing the reciprocity that must be present between one’s inner and outer work…[A]n important road map to social change.” ~~ National Catholic Reporter

The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine

To awaken what Fox calls “the sacred masculine,” he unearths ten metaphors, or archetypes, ranging from the Green Man, an ancient pagan symbol of our fundamental relationship with nature,  to the Spiritual Warrior….These timeless archetypes can inspire men to pursue their higher calling to connect to their deepest selves and to reinvent the world.
“Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know.” — Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society

Visionary theologian and best-selling author Matthew Fox offers a new theology of evil that fundamentally changes the traditional perception of good and evil and points the way to a more enlightened treatment of ourselves, one another, and all of nature. In comparing the Eastern tradition of the 7 chakras to the Western tradition of the 7 capital sins, Fox allows us to think creatively about our capacity for personal and institutional evil and what we can do about them. 
“A scholarly masterpiece embodying a better vision and depth of perception far beyond the grasp of any one single science.  A breath-taking analysis.” — Diarmuid O’Murchu, author of Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics

Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election

Matthew Fox tells us that he had always shied away from using the term “Anti-Christ” because it was so often used to spread control and fear. However, given today’s rise of authoritarianism and forces of democracide, ecocide, and christofascism, he turns the tables in this book employing the archetype for the cause of justice, democracy, and a renewed Earth and humanity.
From the Foreword: If there was ever a time, a moment, for examining the archetype of the Antichrist, it is now…Read this book with an open mind. Good and evil are real forces in our world. ~~ Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit and Conversations with the Divine.
For immediate access to Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ: A Handbook for the 2024 Election, order the e-book with 10 full-color prints from Amazon HERE. 
To get a print-on-demand paperback copy with black & white images, order from Amazon HERE or IUniverse HERE. 
To receive a limited-edition, full-color paperback copy, order from MatthewFox.org HERE.
Order the audiobook HERE for immediate download.