The people that are closest to me know that I have some far out theories relating to the universe, religion, and humanity. I try to keep most of it off social media, as social media itself relates to a lot of what I believe is wrong in the world, but in this case I feel compelled to articulate the one predominate thought that I’m having lately that has filled me with a certain amount of angst.
Our fixation as a human race on all things negative, sinister, and sufferable has created something rather ugly, yet almost intangible… To me, humanity has created it’s own negative thinking hive-mind, and it will eventually cause the fall of all we hold so dear about ourselves. There has always been an unfortunate human condition that subconsciously drives us to focus on the negative and not the positive. To this end, the advent of social media and the readily available nature of news material has created a catalyst which has ramped this up to quite a staggering level. Unfortunately a great deal of global news is indeed negative and this is because media alliances know that this is what sells eyes on articles.
This vicious double circle fuels itself and creates a knock on affect of negative sentiment leading back to the source of the issue - causing either the validation of the problem / ideology / political stance, or even false support structures. In the case of sharing and propagation of news matter relating to violent crime, the affects are more far reaching and even more complicated. The sad state of affairs is that the story of a brutal rape and murder of a person gets a lot of shares - and some of the reasoning for doing so is for awareness and prevention, but a lot of it is for shock factor. Unfortunately basic psychology will tell you that reading the story about a brutal rape is not going to stop a rapist. It is sadly that simple. We need a shift in our fundamental pattern of thinking to stop crimes like those.
This constant barrage of negative flavoured news and attitudes causes a subconscious depression at the state of the world, even though most of the issues that are being absorbed and fixated over have little or no bearing on your own centralised life. This constant flow of negative news matter gives us false ownership of world issues, which invariably causes micro flare-ups between opposing sides on social media, which do absolutely nothing to resolve the situation and just creates the false support structure that I mentioned in the previous paragraph.