Guest post: The Inquisition has given way to the Internetition

Jan 29th, 2022 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by Pliny the in Between on Prone to psychological and medical contagions.

The error we’ve made, I believe, is thinking that the emergence of more mainstream secularism was the same thing as a reduction in religious thinking. Unfortunately that turns out not to be the case. There has been no wholesale rewiring of the Mark 1 human brain. We simply have replaced the repetitive indoctrination that religions provided with that provided by asshats on social media. The programming is the same.

For a time, public education provided enough immersion in enlightenment thinking that our cognitive biases were directed at productive social issues, which is one of the reasons reactionaries targeted that system for destruction. The Inquisition has given way to the Internetition. People are still reviled and any deviation from the equally revealed truth of the new orthodoxy makes one an apostate who deserves to burned on the web.

Of course the libertarian free speech adherents will argue that there is nothing to be done about any of this because of, you know, freedom, but since our notions of freedom are predicated on an outdated model of how actual brains function, we are pretty much screwed.

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