More and more, I see people enthusiastically leaping to conclusions, believing stories which ratify their prejudices and predetermined opinions, believing what they WANT to believe rather than what is probable or even plausible. People choose their opinions, rather than let them form from thoughtful deliberation.
What has caught on like a contagion is:
" the type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the "reason of unreason". . . He wishes to have opinions, but is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion. Hence his ideas are in effect nothing more than appetites in words." ~Ortega
People assume that anything which ratifies their emotionally-held prior opinion must hold true. There are very few who can consistently and coolly stop and warmly submit their opinions and findings to cold scrutiny and the hot bright light of analysis. Few can survey a mountainous subject from all sides rather than mistaking a few aspects of it for the whole.
Perhaps that's the reason why, more and more, stuff that is pushed as real news is complete hogwash. It's getting to the point where it's best just to let new news stories age a little to see if they can withstand the test of time. Many things about which people are breathlessly certain today unravel quickly and are debunked tomorrow. Some truths take a long time to come to light. Perhaps it's this very uncertainty and instability that make people desperately grope for and clutch at anything that feels solid. When you're sinking in quicksand, a blade of grass can look like a saving grace.
There is also a strong compulsion for novelty, to be on the cutting edge, to scoop, to beat others to the punch. But there is also an increased impulse to keep up the pummeling knowing that they can't all be wholly errant punches. Some must hit the mark of truth, and those verities justify the erroneous flailing.
It seems that the hardest thing for most people to admit today is that they were wrong, and the hardest thing to do is genuinely apologize. Perhaps we've been encouraged to live life 'with no regrets' for so long, we have come to believe the lie that regret is a sign of weakness, not strength, and furthermore that genuine remorse is crippling rather than redemptive. But I am digressing, once again, into the dilemma about pride and shame, and the distinctions between self-esteem and self-respect, hubris and humility.
Logical fallacies abound. If we're not asserting false dichotomies or false equivalencies, we're conflating correlation with causation, attacking strawmen or people's character. People want to quickly fit all 'news' into the matrix of their own running narrative, and troubling questions are routinely dismissed and repudiated without careful consideration, much less true refutation.
People have their easy conspiracies and noble causes, their villains and heroes who are either the blackest of evil or the purest white of goodness, and they are eager to signal their own terrific goodness and seize the moral authority by utterly condemning, dehumanizing, or invalidating their opposition. No grey area exists; and certainly not a myriad of colors in many shades.
Narrow absolutism rules the day and cheap purity tests determine who is traitorous to the Grand Cause. People are so busy passionately screaming lies at each other across a sea of misunderstanding (Kipling) that they have no time to discover or understand the deeper truths on which most people would agree, if they just stepped back and looked for common ground.
History shows us that surely there are some terribly evil people in the world, there are many wicked masterminds, and there are many psychopaths and sociopaths (perhaps as many as 1 in every 17 people) who feel themselves beyond good and evil but who will utilize evil and exploit your goodness to get their way. But the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart, and often there is no clear line between right and wrong. Life often offers merely less-than-perfect trade-offs to a world of people who increasingly want all or nothing.
But now is probably as good of a time as any to observe the maxim that fools rush in where wise men fear to tread. Once again it is time to stop assiduously reading The Times, and start reverently reading the Eternities.