The word “grooming” has been brought up a lot in the past year when referencing introducing sexual content to children, but I wonder if we are all being socially groomed to behave unlike ourselves.
As technology grabs our attention even more so than just a decade ago, I am left to wonder if this technological embracement has made us more vulnerable to being hypnotized into translating the world around us in the most pessimistic way possible.
An even more dreadful realization is that even in the face of good news, there are those who will outright reject it and even ridicule you for attempting to help them out of their own comfortable pit of nihilism.
Much like most major news events, the initial reports were missing key details, encompassed a slightly misrepresented testimony, and required more time to investigate to confirm or refute the initial narrative. In this situation, the initial narrative was that there was an explosion near the border resulting in two deaths and that officials were suspecting terrorism.
The fear of terrorism was not completely irrational considering the recent conflict happening in Gaza and nationwide protests between rival political factions. However, when I heard about this event and the initial narrative, I thought to myself, “Why would terrorists target the U.S.–Canadian border, of all places?”
To me, it seemed like an abnormal target for terrorists to want to strike, because it lacked the symbolism of a typical terrorist attack. Usually, terrorists target locations that are directly related or symbolically related to who or what they want to bring death to.
If that’s not an option, they’ll aim for soft targets to bring fear to an entire population in hopes of creating a nervous populace grappling with the terror of possibly being the next victim while doing something mundane.
However, in a matter of 24 hours, the narrative was appropriately corrected by revealing that the situation that had initiated worry over our nation being under attack was a horrific car accident and that the only people who died were the two who were inside the car that crashed.
The explosion described was the same type that you would see with any car traveling at excessive speeds of about 100 miles per hour that smashes into a solid, still object.
The public could now see how the vehicle, a Bentley, went slightly off-road and hit an incline, causing it to fly into the air. You could easily watch the security footage online and witness how the explosion was a car crash fireball and not a massive detonation that you would imagine from previous terrorist attacks.
I couldn’t help but see this as relatively good news, despite the unfortunate deaths of the two people who were inside the vehicle and their families now grieving their loss. It meant we could lower the blood pressure of the nation by removing one less situation from being political and be thankful we weren’t under attack.
But for some people, no matter how I pointed out to them that it’s unlikely that terrorists would purchase one of the most expensive cars in the world to perfectly plan hitting a dirt incline and crash into toll booths killing no one but themselves, some still wanted to hold onto believing that death merchants were roaming our country’s border.
With every detail I gave them about this situation, from left-wing and right-wing sources confirming the same details, their desire to deny what is logical and verified only hardened their stance and weakened my attempts to convince them otherwise.
We are in this situation because we’ve allowed the never-ending stream of biased media and algorithms that curate the internet’s form of “if it bleeds it leads” content to formulate the totality of our worldview rather than seeing it as a slither.
We are social creatures meant to interact with each other, but we’ve substituted genuine personal interaction with a technological replacement that has a financial incentive to keep us fearful, doubtful, and isolated.
The objective is to make us reactionary consumers, and much like how we have a hard time not staring at the crashed vehicle on the side of the road, programmers have constructed a technological manipulator that knows how to trigger this instinct to gravitate toward the worst at all costs and in every situation.
Once the system completely captures your attention, it can convince you that the world you used to know was actually artificial and that the exaggerated societal caricature you’ve been mindlessly staring at for hours a day, with ads fused in between, is the authentic reality that was withheld from you your entire life.
My positive spin on the situation is only possible because I’ve rejected being groomed by social media to desire the worst possible outcomes despite the pressure to constantly adhere to every doom-and-gloom scenario that is brought forward to the public.
Now, it’s your turn.
