Angry behavior on social media is killing you and hurting your cause

I’ve been away from Facebook for more than a year, but I recently waded into the waters of insanity there briefly. It was an eye-opening experience.

Facebook owns Instagram and is pushing users to integrate their accounts on the two services. Somehow, my Instagram settings were changed — without my knowledge — in a way that published all of my Instagram posts to Facebook. This meant I had to spend some time figuring out how to untangle the two accounts again. Out of curiosity, I browsed my old Facebook news feed while I was there.

The experience reminded me why I left. More than anything, though, it left me questioning the mental stability and judgment of some friends who I’ve always believed are good people. The raging political hatred they were expressing left me alarmed.

It wasn’t that I disagreed with the specifics of their political or social positions, in many cases. But the rage and hatred they were spewing made it seem that they had lost all perspective about life. It seemed as though the medium of social media had turned them into raging monsters.

They were angry about things they couldn’t control in the real world, so their rage drove them to scream with hatred of their enemies on Facebook. This does absolutely nothing to change the world around them in the ways they want — and that internal rage appears to be destroying them.

When people who had been intelligent and thoughtful in their posts for years gradually shift to obsessively posting angry diatribes about their hated political enemies, it tells me how toxic and corrosive their thinking has become.

When you act in this way, you’re not doing anything to change the policies you hate. In fact, the truth is that it is almost impossible to change the things you hate about politics. I know you’ve been brainwashed to believe that you can change the world through political action — even with minor involvement — but this is a lie.

The people who have a vested interest in your obedience need you to believe you have a say in how things are run, but you don’t. Not really. Powerful elites in societies take varying degrees of control over periods of decades or centuries — and they don’t give up their powers easily. It’s easy to just broadly think that “the rich” are the elites, but this isn’t true.

The elites are big business groups and labor unions and the state school establishment, among many others. In many cases, groups which are deeply entrenched in the powerful elite — school teacher unions, for instance — revel in their ability to make you believe that they are oppressed outsiders. But these sorts of groups have huge influence over what policies are adopted by politicians.

You as an individual have almost zero influence. That isn’t going to change.

The notion that you can become a powerful voice for your views on social media and convince other people to support you position is simply a fantasy. If it helps you sleep at night, I guess you can do what you want, but it’s simply disconnected from reality.

For every one person who happens to become a legitimate influencer — for about 15 minutes, most of the time — there are 10 million or so who are completely powerless. The sane and reasonable assumption is that you are one of those powerless people.

If you are powerless to change what’s going on in the immediate world around you — what politicians do to you or allow done to you — your only rational and reasonable response is to figure out how you can react that will best accomplish your desires and meet your needs.

You can’t fight a reality which you didn’t create. You will destroy yourself trying. But you can move somewhere that’s more friendly to your point of view. You can physically move to a place that might be safer. You can look at where money and investments are going and make rational decisions about how to avoid being hurt by the actions of those politicians who you can’t control.

If you have the proactive willingness to deal with reality and react in the way that is most likely to achieve what you want, you are the one in control of your life.

If you allow the actions of politicians to turn you into a hateful and raging monster, you will have allowed them to have ultimate control. You will have given up control over the one part of this world which is truly yours.

If you want to let them control you, keep obsessing about things you can’t control. Keep screaming and making yourself look like a fool to other people. And keep letting the toxic anger corrode you on the inside.

If you don’t want them to control you, accept reality, whether you like it or not. Understand which things you can control and which things you can’t. Start making decisions about the things over which you do have control.

The world is never going to be what I want it to be. Or what you want it to be. But that doesn’t mean we have to let the toxicity of the world destroy us. How we react — especially inside — is completely up to us.