This article is a great example of the struggles of living in our highly constructed world. It has been thousands of years since the mathematically average human lived a natural lifestyle and the rest of us trying to make big interconnected settlements work have been blundering it because what a big society needs is for us to constantly work against many aspects of our nature. No one can just live by their instincts and expect everything to work out, and anyone encouraging people not to think are literally trying to take advantage of what people tend to do when they forgo rationally considering key decisions.

It is very uncomfortable and distressing to hear about major disasters my government is responsible for, and it would be much more natural and fulfilling to me if all I needed to know was how to master my local environment with the rest of my band, but we have historical examples of atrocities being allowed for long periods of time due to nothing more than popular carelessness. If more people had the moral courage to expose themselves to the realities of our government and their own beliefs, I can’t imagine Hillary, Trump, or Biden would have come anywhere close to winning their respective primaries over the past so many years. These elections took place as a consequence of trusting that there were no ulterior motives for any information offered by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News by most who cared to vote and the rest simply closing themselves off from the process. Just carelessness. Simply hearing about the information spread by these outlets second-hand is probably even worse since it will be filtered through an individual’s interpretation of it. The solution can’t be to try to close oneself off from the outside world.

Uncritical reading of the product of highly compromised information companies is a bad thing, as this article discusses. The solution is not willful ignorance, but the more difficult and less comfortable path which is ultimately more beneficial to oneself and their society. Continue to read the news and in addition, be critical of it. Understand that the news starts with a reporter and then goes through a process of edits influenced by the editors’ biases, the advertisers’ desires, and the orientation toward maximizing profit. Reading foreign news coverage of the same events filtered through an often totally different set of biases can make the important information itself more clear. Just as important as what the major news sources are covering are important events they aren’t covering which tend to get picked up by independent outlets with fewer restrictions. The American media blackout of the Standing Rock protest was particularly notable. I have always wondered how that event may have turned out if it were given more coverage than page 7 of the AP one time.

It almost certainly is better for our mental health to block out unpleasant information. We weren’t built for this society we have. We have a lot of work to do before we can approximate a natural lifestyle in our constructed society. There are powerful forces creating an information environment to manufacture our consent, and ignoring that they are doing that will not fix anything.