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The Cold Comfort of Screaming Into an Echo Chamber
Some thoughts on winning the battle while losing the war
I consider myself a fairly reasonable, if often grumpy, person. Sure, I go off on rants every Sunday, but that’s as much a way of keeping myself sane as anything else. I try to atone for it by writing about saints on Mondays, yet tellingly the rants get roughly ten times more views than the much calmer saints. Harangues grab eyeballs better than hagiographies.
This fact has had me thinking a lot lately (never a good thing for anyone), but it took a line from a recent piece by Chris Zappa to crystalize my wandering thoughts into something semi-concrete. Talking about his frustration with anti-vaxxers and Trumpians, he wrote this:
For every one of these dummies, there are more of us who are sane enough to call them on their bullshit.
The thing is, I think he’s wrong about that (no offense, Chris). I think we simply believe it both because it’s comforting and because the echo chamber we all live in makes it easy to believe. Yes, President Biden got 81 million votes in the 2020 election to Trump’s 74 million. On the surface that supports the “more of us” idea. But we also know that many of those Biden voters chose him simply because he wasn’t Trump.
