"People of reason are ever dismayed by warmongers and demagogues, who enchant weak minds for wealth and power. That civilisation has advanced despite such endemic greed and sociopathy is a miracle to cherish."
The thoughts of others was surely an eternal curiosity. It tormented too many millions of us like some unscratchable itch.
Then telepathy was born.
By late last century it seemed civilisation might survive the distraction of ignorance and be well on its way to a sane technocracy and put aside its fascination with war and religious fanaticism.
But, no...
Someone just had to invent social media. Well, it rather invented itself, forming in cyberspace, an inevitable emergent byproduct of what the Internet could not help but do. By its very nature.
And the result?
Well, now telepathy is real. It's happening.
We hear, see, read, the thoughts of too many - everyone, it feels like. They all have a voice. You hear them from the moment of waking. Three quarters of us - six or more billions - will connect to the Internet upon awakening.
There was a time, receding to oblivion, when the entire world's factual news was collected by dedicated agencies and disseminated by disciplined reporting outlets that (this will be hard to believe) were dedicated to truth and accuracy. Some were state controlled, some were slanted to the whims of a wealthy and powerful proprietor - for all of which some diligence from the consumer was in order. But these media organisations were more trustworthy than at any time in history, for very few wanted their dishonesty or stupidity immortalised in print, and subsequent jeering humiliation by their peers.
The peak has passed, as has their time. The Internet - the seventh sense of our being - is now the organ of "knowledge." And like any information processing organ, it's either truth in and out, or rubbish in, rubbish out.
Yes, it was a conformist society. We might ask: do we want a conformist society with factual reporting, or a free-thinking society that spends all its time sifting a tsunami of unverifiable information asserting factuality?
Now crowding the information highway (there is no better term) are teeming millions of "wannabee news" outlets pouring out an infinite range of ideas, facts, non-facts, lies, truths, opinions, orders, beliefs... from the entire spectrum of human personalities that ranges from psychopathy, malevolence, narcissism, hatred, love - through our consensus of sanity (itself a very broad church) - to that other extreme: blind fanaticism, religious intolerance, and utter delusion.
It now dominates politics most clearly - particularly the political theatre in the United States of America. That republic has come under threat from itself, many times, whether in political assassinations or in overwhelming xenophobia. And for the last ten years the most abysmal of humans has assaulted democracy.
A seemingly impregnable democracy eroded from within by voters unable to navigate a purgatory of misinformation in which their feeble, lazy intellects slowly mire.