Some days ago one of the most reputed most known Italian contemporary writer, Umberto Eco, passed away. In my view he was very sharp and I like some of his quotes. The one I like most is about books:
“People who don’t read will reach the age of 70 having lived only one life, their own. Those who read will be living 5000 years; they where there, with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, they joined when Renzo and Lucia married and where there when Leopardi wrote “the Infinito", as reading brings immortality’.
There is another quote of Umberto Eco (and an interesting comment to it) which keeps me thinking, which I would like to share:
“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”
Among the many comments to this quote, Dr Jim West wrote on his blog:
“… the idiots have the right to speak but they should have no expectation that anyone with sense will listen to them much less take them seriously. The idiots have as much right to be heard as CNN and the Huffington Post and Fox News and NBC and ABC and CBS and the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. But like those outlets of infotainment, they have no right to be taken seriously when they speak about matters like theology or history or exegesis or archaeology.
Indeed, the truth is, only idiots heed idiots. So let them. Those who wish to know better will seek to know better and those who are satisfied with rank ignorance, stupidity, and misinformation will never care for the truth any more than a person who watches the Naked Archaeologist really cares about the facts. Their ignorance is invincible. They should be left to it. To rot in the swampy stew of their own putrid mindlessness.”
Here my two cents’: I like both comments. Further I believe that one day the social media will collapse and/or implode for the reasons mentioned by Mr. Eco. However I do not share Dr. West’s optimism.
And that is because of Bias.
Bias was a politician and legislator of the 6th century BC and was one of the “seven wise men”. Asked several time to write a sentence to be engraved on a temple, Bias refused many times because his quote was “dangerous”. At the end he changed his mind and provided this sentence:
αʹ οἱ πλειστoι κακoί
“The majority of men is bad”
This sentence is dangerous: if we accept its validity, certain pillars of our western civilization are at risk of collapse. Democracy, for example. Bias was really a wise man.
Shall we trust democracy? Of course! There is no better system I am aware of.
Shall we always trust the majority? I am not so sure....
Mussolini and Hitler were democratically elected.....
At a closer look we do not always trust the majority of people. In our constitutions we exclude referendums for tax matters because the vast majority would vote to abolish any tax (even if taxes, if properly spent for good purposes like education, roads, health care are the basis of our society).
Even if I hope that Bias is wrong, I do not succeed in trusting the majority of us as able to discern what is good from what is bad in the net. And there is nothing we can do about it.
As everything which is human, the “invasion of the idiots” as Mr Eco puts it, will come to an end.
At some point.
