It boggles my mind how quickly a group of fans can go from 'This person is perfect, I love them, they are amazing, let me build a shrine in my closet' to 'This person is so stupid and ignorant, they are the anti-christ, how could you be so heartless' when said person expresses themselves in the form of a harmless opinion.
In fact, it boggles my mind how fast people turn from amiable conversationalists to raging lunatics when there is an opinion expressed that is even marginally against their own.
I'm getting confused by the masses. Am I supposed to be a free-thinking person who forms my own mind and self....or am I supposed to be closed-minded and follow the majority blindly? Some days I think the invention of the internet and social media were a step backward in humanity's development.
Find a forum with 15 athiests raging about how the world would be a better place if all religious people could be rounded up and burned alive. (This doesn't require some seedy corner of the internet, that kind of behavior is publicly expressed all the time.)
Physically relocate those people into a room with a religious person.
Crowd mentality would see the religious person dead within an hour. Especially if that person decided to stand up for their beliefs.
Because that is what human nature has been for thousands of years, and that nature is what people are exposed to on the internet in unbridled form. Human beings are inherently intolerant of foreign ideology, and crowd mentality will see that rise to lethal levels for as long as there are differences among the population.
If anything the internet gives people an outlet.
But with crime statistics what they are, that outlet is as bad of an influence on behavior as it is a release.
Some people need a proper outlet to prevent them from acting on an internal bias.
Some people are spurned to action by having their outlet 'justified' by their peers.
Civilization and Society are two different things.
Civilization has changed, and differs from place to place. Society is hardly any different. The gangs of Africa, inner cities, and even mafias are like the feudal states, waring tribes, and bickering familial lineages of any other time period. And any student of history knows that our first world civilizations are no different from that of the roman or greek empires. (Eerily so, especially right before they fell.) The origin of the very word "forum" comes from the idea of doing
exactly what we are doing right now, only in person a few centuries ago.
The only difference is that you
see it. If it weren't for the internet I would never enter a KKK meeting, might even think "racism" is just that way old people sometimes say politically incorrect things. But thanks to the internet I get to see racism and intolerance everywhere I look, just like everyone else. It's disgusting, but it's always been there.
I wouldn't know about death and war in Africa if it wasn't for the internet either. But it's been that way for centuries.