What Price Lunacy?

Does It Matter If the President-Elect Says Crazy Stuff?

In my last post, I made the case that in a world of information overload, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and other assorted forms of hoo ha pouring in through all of our electrical orefices simultaneously, it was very important to sort through it all carefully. Much of it is worthless, empty calories. Some of it is intentionally inflammatory but little more than that. Some of it is deliberately distracting. And only very little of it is actually important and worthy of our time, consideration and action.

Further, in a world full of very real risks and challenges in which we have limited resources, it is also vitally important that we zero in on what matters.

Naturally, I got a variety of responses to the post. Many agreed. Some were flattering. (Thank you.) And several posed a question I expected: How do you tell? What is really important.

The context of the piece and the question was political and so a big part of the discernment process referred to the world we are entering with our next president and is based on our experiences with him for the past decade. But before I wade into that, I do want to make a point that I sometimes feel compelled to raise here in the Washington, DC metro area. That is that while the news and social media are often full of political stories and the importance of those stories is often amplified (further distorted) in DC because it is a one company town in which virtually everything is abou tthe government…politics and what happens in Washington is often much less important than headlines or cable news coverage would lead you to believe.

Yes, that’s right, love, life, and family are more important. (Grizzly, my research assistant just woke up to say, “Pets, too.”) But so too for most of us in terms of consequences for our daily lives are the economy (which is much less influenced by DC than pols would have you believe), our workplace, our communities, the shapers and drivers of our cultural, spiritual and intellectual lives, and well, also the weather.

In terms of issues of gravity, it is also clear—especially given the current and likely continuing dysfunction in Washington—that the stories that will really determine the future course and quality of our lives are more likely to come from the worlds of science, healthcare, and technology…or from the rest of the world altogether.

That is not to say politics isn’t important. It is simply to put it in its proper place. If we had a functioning mental and spiritual health equivalent of the FDA, it would recommend that politics takes up no more than 3-8 percent of your daily intake of stimuli. (Screen time generally ought to be less than 20-30 percent impossible as that may seem.) Try it. Trade one hour of heated social media exchanges on this week’s hot topic du jour for a longer meal with your family, time spent with a book, music or staring at the far horizon or into the stars and you’ll be better for it…and better equipped to assess and handle whatever is coming next from all the big brains here in Washington.

Having said that, we do still have to keep an eye out as to what is happening in DC because it does impact our lives. We have to pick our sources of information carefully so that what we get is something like the truth. (It’s getting harder all the time. See Mark Zuckerberg’s latest decision re: fact-checkers at Meta. Then, maybe rewatch “The Social Network” and realize that it was a movie without heroes. You almost start rooting for the Winklevosses. But don’t. We can discuss their crypto exploits later.)

Then, once we have a rough idea of what is really happening or being said, we have to determine whether it will matter. A perfect illustration of this arose today, just hours after I wrote my last post.