The Catacomb of Echo Chambers

I'm back in my hometown and ready to go to the polls tomorrow. The drive home was painful as the Karak Highway was a bumper-to-bumper crawl. But at least it gave me an opportunity to catch up on my podcasts and audiobooks.

My hometown is nestled in the hills and I always feel a certain clarity of mind every time I'm back here. The silence here is filled with the hum of insects and the merry call of birds. It was here that I had started pondering the mysteries of the world out there, leading to the long journey which finally brought me back here today.

The most important thing I learned during my schooldays in this humble hometown of mine is the scientific method. The way how truth needs to be tested repeatedly--how outward appearances can be deceiving and that empirical evidence has to be respected. Even the readings of scientific instruments need to be be carefully qualified and they have to be checked repeatedly for human errors. 

The human mind is a bias machine. It likes to latch on to easy and convenient 'truths'. We all have our pet theories about the world, especially when it comes to the subject of politics. If only all of us possess the scepticism of scientists, the world will certainly be a better place...but perhaps a duller one. A person with a scientific mindset will find most gossips 'interesting' and nothing more than that. At best it is a hypothesis. And every hypothesis needs to be subjected to tests to prove its veracity.

Will we ever know with 100% certainty about certain 'truths' when it involves matters in politics and economics? The brain apparently is quite inept when it comes to statistics and probabilities. Human instinct is a kind of heuristics honed by evolution when our ancestors were living in small hunter-gatherer communities. 

We probably have a pretty good grasp of how members of our own family think or feel, even members of our clan or tribe, whom we know personally. But in our world today, we live in a large community of strangers. Do we know how the entire population of a country feel? Is it even reasonable to generalise an opinion that way? Is it any surprise that politicians often fail to gauge the mood of the people? 

So we fall back on our natural biases and beliefs. This is not helped by the fact that we also have a natural ability to delude ourselves, preferring to believe things that make us feel good. Anything that supports our biases in social media is applauded and forwarded. Social media is nothing but a network of cults, each amplifying a specific world-view.

We all feel comfortable cocooned in our own bubbles because everything we see or hear reinforces our beliefs.  Instead of binding human together in a living matrix of knowledge and ideas, social media is but a catacomb of echo chambers. And even here in the solitude of my childhood home, I hear them still, those distant howls of hatred and anger, like the lamentations of the damned from some hellish realm.