Text By Charles Angell

An interesting phenomena regarding news reading habits on the web shows how people tend to focus much more on specific sources of information. So while a savvy web user may have access to thousands of diverse news sources, they will gravitate toward those that reflect their established biases. It appears that rather than expanding our horizons, greater opportunity has actually narrowed our focus. Ironically, a well read person in the 80s with significantly less access to alternative sources would have been exposed to a much more diverse gamut of information.

I spend a fair amount of time looking websites that are in one way or another fascinated with the mythology and conspiracy theories surrounding 2012 . Many say that a great change lurks just beyond the horizon and they theorize endlessly about what that might be and how it might come about. Often, if they are not Monotheistic, they will have constructed a set of ideas describing some sort of massive environmental alteration that will inspire a great evolutionary change in humanity. In some ways, it is similar to the Christians and their myth of the Apocalypse .

More and more often I read posts where people say that they can feel this great change coming and those that don’t are somehow asleep or not paying attention. They will often speak about their feelings as if they were facts, as if they knew their feelings to be objective truth, as if their interpretation of the jumbled mass of stimuli we receive through our senses to be the correct one.

I’d say that it’s entirely likely that what they are feeling is a self affirming loop. That is, they convince themselves of a certain reality because they focus narrowly on that type of information and they interact very little with people that think differently. Consequently, their ideas are not significantly challenged and the weak or faulty notions continue to be entertained rather than discarded.

While I may not personally feel a great change looming, I do feel that many, very intelligent people are deeply disturbed by an increasingly complex world environment that is quite alien from what has been our natural environment for some hundreds of thousands of years. We are genetically programmed for, and on a primal level we expect, a much different world than the one in which find ourselves.

We are magnificent predators that have over much time mastered first tools and then symbols to such an extent that we now believe they are reality. We believe that our symbolic constructs constitute the reality of life. Consequently, because we are the masters of the symbols, we have come to think we are the masters of reality. We have become infatuated with the idea that we are God.

While that seems quite foolish to me, who knows – maybe we are. Maybe God is composed of billions of little turds that admire themselves endlessly. Yet somehow I can’t help but feel that a little more humility is in order.