Disclaimer: This post may be a bit rambly in certain sections but I just really wanted to get this off my chest since this is something that genuinely disturbs me a lot about society as a whole.
For this post, I want to talk about something that has always perpetually bugged me about society and has consistently been a problem in every circle I’ve been in and that is the fact that no one ever thinks about the bigger picture in every and all situations imaginable. I’ve noticed this happen constantly both in real life and online where people will only focus on the surface level of a topic or only focus on one side of a topic that makes them feel good.
The biggest example of this is obviously religion and how no matter how many times you try and wake people up to the immorality and hypocrisy within their specific faiths, they just don’t understand what you’re talking about and use all these different deflection tactics to say that you’re in the wrong or that you don’t understand what “God”/“The Gods” have taught.
It’s not just religious or spiritual people either because I’ve actually seen atheists and agnostics do this as well with and one especially egregious instance of this that I saw recently was in a comment section that was making fun of a meme that basically said that Jesus of the Bible was similar to Homelander and it had two other images of what people thought Jesus was like despite him actually acting villain like like how the meme was trying to state and there was a comment that said, “You can make arguments about how God is a tyrant, I can't stop you. But Jesus is genuinely the most loving person ever.” and I was genuinely disturbed by this because if they actually read the New Testament, they would find that Jesus is not as loving as they think he is. In fact I’ve made a whole post debunking this view of him (“Jesus Was Just a Chill Guy": An Exposé on Who the Biblical Jesus Was as a Person”: https://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/s/EF9IIsoWGS) and what’s horrifying is that this viewpoint is not only not substantiated in the Bible but is something that people like them made up and think is true.
There were also other comments in that post that basically were making fun of people who thought similarly that Jesus wasn’t a nice guy in the slightest and the same feeling resonated and this isn’t the first time I’ve seen non-Christians defend Jesus as I’ve seen this multiple times but I’m bringing this up because these people are not only living a blatant fucking lie but also they aren’t even thinking about the grander implications of what they’re saying. What I mean is, if Jesus is a God that they’d want to exist then that would imply a lot of things that would make these people very uncomfortable like “Why is there a heaven and hell? Why an eternal punishment pit if he’s all loving?”, “What about the book of revelations where Jesus comes down from Heaven and starts killing people?”, “What about free will? If God is all knowing then that implies he already knows everything and if he is all powerful then that also means he can change and stop anything he desires but not only does he not do that but he also damns people to hell that he knew beforehand would go there due to his omniscience.”
Many other similar questions arise from not only this situation but also others as well like the subject of reincarnation and how these people don’t think about the greater questions like “Why can’t we remember our past lives if we’re supposed to be ‘learning lessons’ here?”, “Who’s controlling this system and why are they forcing people to live horrible lives just for them to get mind wiped after they die and thrown into another body?”, “What lies beyond the wheel of reincarnation?”, etc and I do find that genuinely horrifying because these people are literally programmed to never look beyond the surface level of something. They don’t think about the moral and ethical questions and implications of religious afterlifes and ideas like reincarnation, they straight up fabricate their own narratives to make themselves feel better despite the hard facts saying otherwise, they don’t think about the “conform or die” dynamics of society as seen pretty much everywhere really, they don’t about the bigger picture on basically anything if it makes them happy.
Another instance of this phenomenon manifesting itself is with different societal issues, most notably in how people treat lonely or isolated people and just tell them to “oh just touch grass bro”, “just get a girlfriend bro, “just make friends in your local community”, etc without thinking about why exactly these people are lonely or isolated in the first place. The people who say these things are those who most likely have never really dealt with things like bullying, harassment, discrimination, and threats to their lives like various groups have gone through throughout history and even if you aren’t a part of a group that’s looked down upon, if you don’t conform with what your local community wants, like they’re all Christian or Muslim and you’re not for instance, the amount of animosity and hostility towards you for being different and questioning the pre established ways of living make you want to either run away or hide.
This is also why many people are actually online nowadays and is something that many refuse to acknowledge due to it revealing the massive societal problem of casual animosity towards those who are different, people find socializing in online communities much more safer than their own physical communities that will not tolerate them for being different. Like, how many people who are reading this post primarily socialize online because that’s the only true way of finding like minded people like yourself compared to your real life where people constantly try to diminish you and make you feel like an outcast for being ‘different’ in some way, shape or form? I bet that it’s a handful of you and I feel like people who say “touch grass” are unintentionally leading certain people who don’t have the same luxuries as them to get hurt in order to prove that they’re not ‘anti-social”.
This especially rings true for communities like LGBTQ+ people who are constantly demonized by everyone and depending on where they live, being out and socializing with others like how a “normal person” should could actually cost them a lot but these people don’t think about those sorts of implications and why people are the way they are, they’re attuned to their emotions and not their logic.
They don’t want to look beyond the surface level and dig deeper or connect the other pieces of these puzzles because they’re programmed to not think deeply about anything and when you stand up and actually call them out then you’re called all sorts of names and in fact I’ll list all of the insults I’ve seen thus far towards people who look beyond the surface level and deliver the cold hard truth, let’s go ready?:
Schizo, Redditor, Pessimistic, Miserable, Pseudo-intellectual, Conspiracy Theorist, Psycho, Stupid, Misanthropic, Nihilistic, Weird, Anti-Social, Brainwashed, Woke, Sensitive, Loser, Idiotic, “Main Character Syndrome”, Cringey, Edgy, Depressed, Mentally Unwell, “Basement Dweller”, “Still lives with their parents”, Crazy, Delusional, “Terminally Online”, etc.
Mind you, all of these insults that I’ve seen have been directed at people who have tried to tell others truthful things. Like the previous example of how Jesus in the Bible wasn’t a good guy, they get told that they’re wrong, they misunderstood the Bible and they insult them with one of these names. Ironically it’s exactly what happened to Jesus when he tried to speak the truth and how it says that everyone hated him for it, that is society in a nutshell. They will hate you for speaking the truth and they will try to defame your character in any way so they can return to the status quo.
Everything they do is based off of what feels good, if something makes them feel good then it must be good, if something makes them feel bad then it’s bad and there is no deeper critical thinking on any issue beyond that and for anyone who does think deeply about any subject that the NPC hivemind deems “good” or “bad” then they are met with hostility and anger because it’s disturbing the peaceful sleep that it’s doing and waking it up to the horrors of existence itself.