Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Modern Bohemia (1924)

"It might not yet be too late to choose another fate."

Modernity has been a concerted move away from the tribal toward the more universal. Equality, fraternity, and liberty were impossibilities as long as some people were considered naturally better than others. Of course, conservatives always faunched at these aspirations, for they believed tribal identities had been bestowed by God. Which God was beside the point because each tribe firmly believed that only their God was legitimate, and the rest were clearly pretenders or outright frauds. Secular societies were unprecedented two hundred and fifty years ago. It seemed for a time that the secular would surely succeed where kings and commissars had failed, but then the ultimate level playing field arrived, dragging social media behind it, and we commenced to re-fragment.

The tribes became almost immediately self-evident. Those engaged in criminal activity loved the newfound anonymity social media offered. They could carry on with their nefarious activities without the authorities poking into their business. Governments created super-secret forms of communication before setting out to crack each other’s codes. Individual people seemed to adopt the new technology by self-selecting which societies they’d claim. Knitters joined with their peers, and deer hunters joined theirs. Liberals and conservatives enforced new barriers to sharing or even having to care about their opponents’ opinions. Social media became ubiquitous while simultaneously recreating a Tower of Babel. Specialized dialects proliferated while our liberal society seemingly disintegrated.

I find it curious, perhaps ironic, that given freedom, people tend to construct little prisons for themselves again. Remove oppressive governance, and people will inflict it upon themselves. I might conclude that we don’t natively know what to do with freedom. We seem to mistake it for latitude or a simple lack of discipline. The subtle part about absolute freedom lies in the necessity of applying an increasing level of self-discipline then, for dictator or no, forward momentum relies upon reigning in many of the baser human tendencies. A free society demands more prohibitions than any authoritarian one, since most of the essential bans can only be enforced by oneself and not by any other enforcement mechanism. We require ethics and morals within which to exercise our freedoms; otherwise, they prove to be meaningless or much worse in practice.

The trolls stalking our social media’s halls are not exercising freedom with their presence, but their dedication to whatever serves as freedom’s opposite: oppression. Freedom of expression does not necessarily include any obligation to criticize any other. It, too, must know boundaries and color within those limits. Our social media barely qualifies as social and rarely satisfies the demands of any actual media. We limit its range and utility. Special interests intervene, attempting evangelical transformation. Their absolute insistence that they know better and that they must therefore reform others so that they might properly enjoy their freedom amounts to the most absolutely oppressive form of despotism. The chiding and belittling common to every neighborhood listserv notwithstanding, we could have chosen to move beyond our Tribes to discover and revel in what we share inside. It might not yet be too late to choose another fate.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz