And what does this do to our discourse, when so many people are forced to fight for opinions they don't understand, or do understand but don't really hold? Social media feeds become filled with lies and bad arguments, polluting the public well of information, and turning the arena of ideas into a scrapyard of knock-off notions and second-hand sentiments.What positions do you loudly hold merely for their social capital in your synthetic peer group?
The end result of the opinion pageant is a fraudulent world, a world where most people's opinions are not their own. It’s a world of puppets being ventriloquised by strangers—strangers who are likely themselves puppets. In such a world, where words matter more than deeds, and opinions matter more than character, being “smart” requires no gift for thought, only a gift for mimicry, and being “good” requires no heart of gold, only a silver tongue & brazen nature.
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