2400 years ago a ‘troll’ wandered the streets of Ancient Athens.
He pissed a lot of people off. He was an old dude who went around and looked for “philosophical” conversations. You must understand that before Socrates, there was no such thing as “philosophy”. So this caught everybody off guard. What Socrates would do, is ask a lot of questions. And I mean a lot of questions, much more than any single person was used to. And he asked these questions in such a way as to confuse and anger most people. You see, an adult male asking a bunch of questions seems rather childish. Why don’t you know the answers already? You’re an adult male. You’re supposed to know these things already. You’re not supposed to ask too many questions.
But he did ask too many questions. And these questions were not random, but, implicitly directed to certain points of conversation. Socrates used this technique (which we call Reason today) to expose ignorance in everybody. And he was too successful at reasoning. People always gave up attempting to reason with or against Socrates in the end. He was too good at what he did, which was, expose that level of human nature which everybody glosses over, pretends does not exist, or is simply afraid of.
People are afraid of truth, at a core level, afraid of exposing values and inner truths that they didn’t even realize they had.
For example, a christian believes in God his or her whole life. Socrates comes along, exposes this belief as blatantly false or irrational, and what remains afterward? The christian spent his or her whole life, living it according to a lie. This is very traumatic and devastating. Because people live their lives according to principles, values, beliefs, faith, trust. People trust their families, authorities, institutions, education, etc. People believe in love, that parents love their children and children love their parents.
Imagine of all these beliefs, all your beliefs and values, came crashing down into one giant heap of rubble. Imagine that you had spent a lifetime building something, a house, a family, a community, and one giant wave of water, a flood, washed over everything and destroyed all that you had spent your 80 years of life working on. Imagine if you had worked for 40 years in Enron, and some bank executives and top 1%ers cleaned out your entire retirement fund. It hurts.
And so philosophy hurts, when you do it too well. You’ll need to keep this in mind. Because there is a digital Socrates traversing the world through the internet. And just the same as 2400 years ago, the world has not changed much, if at all. Everywhere across the world, people are as ignorant as ever. And from the perspective of Socrates, what we call “humanity” has not taken one step forward, not one inch forward, when it comes to reason. People are just the same as 2400 years ago. They refuse to reason, refuse to think, refuse to doubt, refuse to engage philosophy, refuse inquiry, investigation, discourse, debate, argument. They refuse it all, often viciously. And why?
Because the digital Socrates is a nuisance, same as before. The only real difference is the population of Athens changed to the population of the World. From 100,000 citizens to 7,000,000,000 citizens. That’s all that’s really changed. Nothing else has.
Now Socrates wanders the pathways and tunnels of the internet, instead of the dirt and cobbled roads of Athens. This postmodern, global world, is no different from before. And neither has Reason nor Ignorance changed at all.