Unplugging, For Sanity’s Sake

Revisiting The Social Dilemma

“The greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry, empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.” – Josef Pieper (1904-1997)

The 2020 docudrama The Social Dilemma attempts to cast light on the dis-integrating effects that social media is having on human culture. The film interviews current and former tech-insiders who provide insight into how the technology they helped developed is perniciously designed to manipulate both our instinct for personal connection and our neurological reward systems. They discuss how social media platforms have now grown beyond the control of their designers as part of our cultural infrastructure, especially through the ease of access afforded by smartphones. The devices and applications which submerge our attention are economically incentivized to leverage extreme emotions like outrage in order to maximize engagement, and they do so with predatory yet mindless efficiency.

Human history knows well how technology has been appropriated for the ends of greed and power. But technology has never had such a pervasively corrupting influence at the level of individuals and families, through the sowing of not merely ideological division and confusion but a more basic distrust and animosity towards each other. This leads to a form of fundamental social breakdown that has been not unforeseen, but mis-foreseen. As bizarre and dystopic as modern life has become in certain ways, it’s not what various sci-fi writers have envisioned. We have not anticipated this component which orients and expedites us towards a precipice that seems somehow both vague and imminent, or how the reins of power would slip from human agency.

Perhaps more importantly, we have not understood the nature of this breakdown or why it remains elusive to identify even as it is happening in the present, in plain sight. The mechanism is none other than the daily, volitional relinquishing of our time and energy to the bottomless pit of glowing screens, which feature an increasingly malevolent social environment and deliberately distorted (if not altogether falsified) information about literally everything – from the veracity of historical and current events, to basic facts such as whether the earth is indeed round (spoiler: it almost definitely is). The part that is more difficult to understand is the effect this has on our human development, personally and collectively.

Consequently, a primary goal of The Social Dilemma is to articulate the insidious nature of the problem, to clarify our collective confusion about it. We share a tangible yet often obscure sense that so much is going awry in the modern world, yet our focus is often overwhelmed by the emerging symptoms of societal tumult rather than its underlying causes. The film attempts to step back, to bring the essence of the problem out of the periphery and into focus so that we can address it more directly. It is analogous to a kind of cultural therapy, in which subconscious matters must be brought to the surface in order to facilitate resolution and healing.

This begins to involve deeper considerations of the substance of our social fabric and what it means for that fabric to unravel. The idea of a problem that we are unable to name or explicitly pinpoint is crucial. Yet, even as the film discusses this - in all our need to become aware of the impact social media and disinformation has on our perceptions and relationships - I believe there is an even more fundamental root of the problem to bring to light, and that is my goal here. I will first try to clarify the nature of the problem in broad terms of the human condition, and then I will look at how social media in particular relates to the problem.

Let’s start from the point that humanity has difficulty understanding itself, and that we universally experience a corruption of our potential for goodness. In different ways we all choose what we think or feel, on some level, to be wrong. This much, at least, is self-evident. Why this is the case, though, is a question that humanity has always been trying to answer.

It’s not that there isn’t an answer, or that different people at different times haven’t understood it. It’s that the communication of deeper insights about human nature hinge on our capacity as recipients, which concerns our holistic personal integration and maturation – psychologically/emotionally, intellectually, and morally. The last of these will be my focus. The premise I will offer here is that the root problem that afflicts humanity is a moral pathology. To greater and lesser extents, we choose what is harmful to ourselves and others. And to greater and lesser extents, we have culpability in the understanding and intention of these choices. But why do we have such difficulty identifying this as the underlying problem?

Here we can take an insight from religious teaching, even for those who are nonreligious. Religion gives a specific name to the problem – that is, sin – the personal effects of which are a darkening of the intellect and a weakening of the will[1]. Call it what you will, the main reason for the obscurity of the problem is that the impact that wrongdoing has on our moral character – its effect on our capacity to rightly perceive moral matters and to act to the good – is not clearly visible to us. We see the material or exterior harm, but less so the interior harm we do to ourselves as moral agents. This notion deserves the most careful consideration, that the principles of goodness become more or less intelligible to us according to how we follow them, how we act with integrity of conscience toward the good. This is not to say that we cannot be sincerely mistaken about what the good is. It is rather to point out the irony that our conscience or moral vision is compromised and obscured by wrongdoing. This becomes more clearly evident at extremes, in the case of true moral villainy. An important observation is that not only do villains persist in wrongdoing, but that they develop a coarseness to it, they become impermeable to the possibility of contrition, reform, and atonement – and tend to lose sight of the truth of their condition in the process. This coarsening, this darkening of the intellect and weakening of the will, is something to become aware of in its real substance, as it results from daily moral choices and in our long-term moral development. It manifests most tangibly in the way people are falsely pitted against others, falsely believing others to be inherent enemies, to be incapable of reconciliation.

Conversely, an understanding of the principles of goodness that we can broadly converge on is that they are relational, they are concerned with people’s material as well as interior well-being. The moral good is essentially a relational good. And so the fostering of our moral integration involves not merely acting “correctly” according to norms or laws, but an increasing recognition of and intention towards the specific good of persons. That is, to recognize ourselves and others more comprehensively in the fullness of our personhood, the singularity of each person’s life narrative, the hidden complexity and uniqueness of how we each have come to be who we are. (I have written about this more extensively in my essay The Potential of the Human Heart.)

An economy of goodness vs wrongdoing which shapes personal integration then serves as a lens through which to understand moral questions. Our ability to work towards a common good is precisely found through the personal integration of individuals, of communities of people who have developed mature capacities for relationship and compassion. In short, the common good depends on common virtue. This matter of personal integration is never something we will “solve” as a society, because integration is a process experienced and developed within each person. Each person depends on specific others for the integrating and healing effects of love. Conversely, the less collectively integrated a culture becomes, it loses the wherewithal to foster further integration.

In this light we can evaluate the cultural effects of social media and parse whether and how it may have the catastrophic impact that some anticipate, such as in The Social Dilemma. Social media serves as a uniquely precise example of the moral quality of social systems, how they help or hinder our capacity to humanize each other, individually or collectively. I’m stating things this way as a signal – viewing the equation from the positive side of humanizing is to again emphasize the obscure nature of the problem. The ability to humanize others, to recognize them in their needs for compassion and forgiveness, is what we’re losing and increasingly fail to realize we’re losing. People often talk about the objectifying or depersonalizing side of social media, but we have a much harder time positively understanding each other’s personhood, seeing into the depths of individuality, the mysteries of essential identity. This encapsulates a fundamental quandary of the human condition: how to understand others in their otherness, how to trust other’s intentions.

The damage we are doing to this capacity to grow into mature personhood is easy enough to see. We communicate to each other so often, and so carelessly, such that it becomes as though a confused babble of voices rising up from across humanity. Our attention spans are laughably short; people can barely read a few paragraphs on one topic, let alone a few pages, without the urge to skim or scroll, to get to the end and move on to something else to similarly pay half a mind to. We are stressed and burdened with a disproportionate sense of agency and responsibility, the feeling that polarizing social issues somehow depend on our fixated attention, let alone more active involvement. Our energy and attention are diverted from tending to those around us. And we are only at the bare beginning of this era. What will society become in just a generation or two?

All of this taken together provides a view into the unraveling of our social fabric. Yet the difficulty is always found at the individual level, and that is where I must make my appeal. The problem always seems other and elsewhere, it always seems to be the system at large. So how do we determine how best to incorporate social media use into our individual lives? What makes it a dilemma is that social media has legitimate and even beneficial uses. For some people it may serve as innocuous entertainment at worst, for many others it serves as a much-needed social outlet, particularly during a pandemic. But this may not be so true as we imagine, and here I propose to reevaluate what may have become our default assumptions on the matter, whether we may be misled in our perception of the harm social media causes us.

The real insidiousness of it must again be understood in terms of the moral spirit. We may be more impacted than we realize by our vicarious interactions – how it becomes easier to judge and criticize others, and harder to humanize, forgive, and recognize them in their need for compassion. We may actually be less closely connected with the people we care about, relegating our interactions to the digital and incidental instead of reaching out intentionally. But the harm that takes place less tangibly comes in the form of omission. Discreetly or not-so-discreetly funneling away countless hours of our time comes at a price that we may take for granted. It is not just the lost opportunity to invest ourselves in actual relationships, actual learning, actual contribution to important causes, but how we become conditioned to prioritize colossal wastes of time ahead of these.

This is not meant to sound alarmist. The extent to which this relational subversion occurs in our lives varies from person to person. But even if some of us manage to use social media well and responsibly, there are masses of others for whom it is as every bit detrimental as we might fear. And so our participation in these corrupting systems deserves a deep and honest look. The general principle to follow could be stated as such: to the extent that our social media use is driven by mere compulsion, or produces hostility in us towards others, or detracts us from tending to the people close to us or investing in substantive interests – it is to that extent that we should unplug, in order to regain possession of ourselves and our intentions, in order to give our time, energy, and attention to people and causes more worthy of them.

The perennial practical question, though, is to what extent we should unplug: limit daily or weekly use? Take periodic breaks? My gentle suggestion in general is simply that the less use, the better. It is a delicate matter to suggest someone give up a thing to which they’ve become attached. Yet unplugging in various degrees tends not to be experienced as the loss we might imagine, so much as a true unburdening. If it is too much to delete everything all at once, try deactivating even for a short time, and notice the difference in a week or a month. Having a ready list of edifying activities helps the effort to reform our habits – exploring new reading, new music, the things we’ve been putting off and may suddenly find we have time for after all.

The reference to sanity in this article’s title is not an exaggeration. It is the sanity of making good choices, of being engaged in people and relationships rather than our devices, and to pass that along to future generations. It is the sanity to be more fully present to our life and those around us, to be true to our responsibilities, to fight as individuals the pervasive apathy that grips the modern world.

The point isn't to change the entire world; the machinery will continue to run as it is. But at least a few people may live less beholden to it, including ourself, if we choose. Let us not discount the good that we might have, or do, when we strive. Think of the transforming effect that even one person can have on others, in some cases touching the lives of thousands or more – or at least dozens throughout a lifetime, who benefit and are themselves made more capable of benefitting others. This is where the future of our cultural integration lies, in helping each other see what is at stake more clearly, in approaching life with resolution and earnest desire to do as much good for everyone as we can. The answer for humanity has always rested in the personal choice to pursue the good.

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[1] Baltimore Catechism 259-266; Catechism of the Catholic Church 405 (by way of St Thomas Aquinas).