How did we go off the rails, so far and so fast?

Photo by Declan Sun on Unsplash

I find it sort of funny that I am constantly concerned about people overreacting to news while simultaneously hosting a sports talk radio show in which myself or my callers are almost always overreacting to something.

Yet I do. I wrote sports and news in newspapers for 26 years before getting out of the business. So, one of my first Substack posts was my thesis statement about news in general:

News is Boring.

So my reflex reaction to 98 percent of what I watch or read is that what is being reported is nowhere near as important as the author would like you to believe.

However, in order to thrive or survive in the business, content creators and distributors have to turn the volume up to 11 to make you engage or return. When, all along, the appropriate volume for the story is 4, maybe 5.

And almost every time I try to watch or read news, I flip out and wonder how news got so far off the rails.

And almost every time I try to read my Facebook or X timeline, I flip out and wonder how seemingly intelligent people could continually amplify information that has no credible basis in fact.

So I wonder if I’m overreacting. I try not to be that guy. I can remember my dad flipping out when soft drink prices increased to 35 cents (his dad flipped out when they increased to 7). I can remember my dad flipping out when Prince made his first appearance on Solid Gold (his dad flipped out when Elvis first appeared on Ed Sullivan).

So am I right when I think a society can’t survive very long when it gives up on truth? Or am I being my dad, and will look back in 25 years and find this to be a rocky but navigable phase in our nation’s history?

I simply can’t help but think we’re at a tipping point — or past one. So few people seem to care about the truth. More people are willing to sacrifice the truth to keep their ideological adversaries from winning than ever before.

So how did we get here?

Newton’s Third Law of Motion can explain how we got here (almost).

I asked AI to explain Newton’s Third Law of Motion like I’m a sixth grader:

Newton's Third Law of Motion is like a see-saw. When you push down on one side of a see-saw, the other side goes up. It's the same with forces.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

So, if you push against a wall, the wall pushes back at you with the same amount of force. You can't push against a wall without feeling the wall pushing back!

For most of American history, we generally trusted authoritative sources. We put stock in peer-reviewed studies. We ceded to scientists. We relied on experts in the field. The official police narrative was treated as close to gospel as you could get. We believed the newspapers and the 5:30 network news anchor. Uncle Sam wasn’t perfect, but he’d level with you.

Occasionally, we would see some cracks in the foundation, but we believed they were inconsequential.

However, information has exploded exponentially over the past 20 years, revealing way more deception than we thought.

We’ve learned that much of the peer review process is flawed. Many scientists have steered their findings away from the facts in an effort to support their ideology. Sometimes the police lie. And we could talk about newspapers for a long time.

And of course this explosion of information has shown us that the government lies a lot more than we used to think.

So all of this revelation had to produce a reaction. However, unlike Newton’s Third Law of Motion, the reaction has not been equal. It has been over the top.

When faced with the reality that our institutions are often lying to us, many people become inclined to simply believe a counter-narrative, whether that particular narrative has any credibility or not.

So there has been a flood of overreaction to this revelation. Since the government hasn’t leveled with us in many situations, it has to be inherently sinister, and racist, with an overall goal of putting people in interment camps, wiping out certain demographics, staging 9/11 and the Sandy Hook mass killing.

Since scientists often mislead us, they’re not simply pushing their own ideology, they’re steering the weather to push storms into conservative states, manufacturing AIDS to attack the black community and implanting nanochips into our bodies for tracking purposes.

Since police aren’t completely reliable, then they’re always planting evidence on innocent people and conspiring to imprison faithful, patriotic Americans.

The action: Our institutions often lie to us.

The overreaction: Our institutions always lie to us, and want to take away our joy, or kill us all.

The question then becomes “what will be the reaction to this overreaction?”

As much as I fear the overreaction phase we’re in now, I fear the next stage even more.