Paraphrasing, CS lewis suggests that we all know the right thing to do basically all the time, and immediately. It is our main-line connection with the divine Truth, the physical manifestation, in our brains and our hearts, of the underlying fact that good and evil actually exist and are not just culturally emergent opinions.

There’s a scale to good and evil.

There’s the good of having children, and the good of not eating sweets.

There’s the evil of killing another person, and the evil of…eating too many sweets.

I like to think that our capacity for confusion somehow tracks with the severity of the evil. Meaning it is more difficult or at least resource intensive to confuse a person into genocide than it is to get them to over indulge.

Of course, in our society there’s a double duty being done on the part of propagandists. Much of the effort put in to get us to eat too much chocolate and to buy electric bicycles and new clothes lays the groundwork for us to accept that some lives are not worth living. Sounds a bit ridiculous but I think it’s true.

In a similar way our acquiescence to eating chocolate is related to our acquiescence to ICE killing women in a moment of pique. The online discourse around justifying or disapproving of that murder has been a study in mass confusion.

There is simply too much information. If we attempt to sip at that fire-hose it’ll blow our lips clean off.

Babel infocalypse, et cetera.

So where do we draw the line?

In Orthodoxy it is suggested that we temper our fasting and grow it year on year. Start by not eating chocolate, then by not eating meat. Maybe in a few years you’ll be able to do the full fast. Running out into the wilderness to wear hair shirts and eat wild honey is a fast track to failure.

Is that the same with access to the infocalypse?

We oughta wean ourselves off by not using instagram for a while, then no reddit, then maybe only use some strange telnet community and discord chat you enjoy until you can finally shutoff wifi completely?  Is it possible to have a healthy relationship with the internet?

I suppose it depends on what we mean by healthy.

But probably not, no.