I started writing this blog post on an online forum, and then felt it might better fit here.

It occurred to me this morning, as sometimes thoughts like this do, during my shower that we (the royal “we”) are once again being manipulated like cattle in the pens heading for the slaughter.  How?  

Ever since the coronavirus lockdowns started, I have internally rebelled at the term, “social distancing.”  Who came up with that term, why, and what does it mean?  In fact, the advice we hear to ostensibly help protect us against contracting the virus, is to physically distance ourselves from one another by six feet. So why not just say so?

Perhaps this is mental manipulation.  Because the more physically distant we become from one another, the more our innate need to socialize (man is a social being) reaches out and finds… social media.

A New Yorker cartoon published on July 5, 1993 – the same year the Internet became public – is captioned, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The implications of this cartoon – the most widely reproduced New Yorker cartoon, according to Wikipedia – are that behind the firewall of one’s computer, one can pretend to be anyone or anything.  Enter “social media.”  I am not a sociologist, although I did some study decades ago in college, but to almost anyone with a semblance of a brain, examples of people pretending to be things they are not run rampant on the Internet. 

So why not us?  My inherent trust in people (which has gotten me in trouble before) wants to believe that everyone reading this is exactly who and what they say they are.  But if I say I’m a 6-foot-5, 250-lb. former Navy SEAL with extensive experience in black ops and multiple contacts within the intelligence community, who’s to say I’m wrong? (I’m not, by the way).  

Judging someone by their looks is almost as bad as judging someone by their intentions.  You can only judge someone by their actions.  It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to take a look at the giants of the tech industry and believe that they weren’t the guys in school the girls were all chasing after.  Facebook, in fact, was created by “geeks” to rate the attractiveness of coeds at Harvard.  It’s probably safe to say that Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and others of their ilk weren’t like Yankee Doodle Dandy, and “with the girls be handy.” The image of the four-eyed geek sitting in his mother’s basement, pens in a pocket protector, gazing at a computer screen is known to everyone, I daresay. 

I was one of them.  I wasn’t “handy” with the girls, but I was good with technology, and made a career of it.  A good career, in fact.  It has allowed me to survive the ups and downs of economic swings, and yes, I got married and had a family.  So even geeks can succeed, depending on how you measure success. 

Being good with technology means being able to manipulate things. Computers, cars, cameras, vacuum cleaners, thermostats, light timers, video recorders (remember those?).  It does NOT mean manipulating people. But I think we have reached a point in our disintegrating culture and civilization where the manipulators are using “social distancing” to push us to “social media” where content and concepts are being filtered to present us with a single view of the world.  Churches, restaurants and bars – places where people gather to talk, exchange ideas and “socialize” are being withheld from us, for reasons that appear to make no sense. The sociopaths have found a way to herd us like cattle.  And the drug of “social media,” where nobody knows we’re a dog, blinds us to that.