An installment of Nick Cave’s fine newsletter (read it, even in you don’t especially like his music) made me think again about a social mystery:
I’ve learned mostly to stay away from Facebook, Twitter, and the comments sections of almost any online forum, because they’ve become infested with ill-will and trashy, hateful expression. Yet in my day-to-day life, almost all the people I meet and speak with are kind and thoughtful. When we disagree, we either exchange disagreements in a civil way or tacitly agree to set them aside. It’s very nice! So, I ask, where does all the online vileness come from?
I spent some time theorizing, came up with a few hypotheses (that’s what I was trained to do). But rather than present them here, I decided just to remind myself that, despite the phantasmic images with which we surround ourselves, human goodness can be found everywhere we look.