another aside on the zombie apocalypse

before we can overthrow the government, we need to talk

Instead of discourse, we waste time policing each other. Didactically acting-out. Diagreeing before the other has finished speaking. I started noticing this years ago, back when I believed in colloquy. I don’t believe in discussion anymore. We aren’t up to it. We have to learn to settle the noise in our heads first, & that is an arduous process even those aware of its necessity are seldom finished with. Self-selected groups can be mobs, can be associations of slightly like-minded individuals, but not (except for rare moments we aren’t smart enough to cherish) a site for discourse. Social media didn’t cause this, it only amplified it. The bee in one’s bonnet is urgency of self-assertion. Like a spring that’s been pushed down, it releases at the earliest opportunity, whether or not it’s part of an ongoing sequence. An alien visiting the Earth wouldn’t have to live among our factories & congresses in order to diagnose our ailment. All they would have to do is catch one episode of a talk show in which people talk over each other constantly & don’t even refer to the substance of each other’s statements. I’m not going to bothsides this, but imagine a plague that destroyed different parts of people’s brains; & the only way people could find to talk about it was by sorting the random noises the plague made them utter into one of two shapes.