Human beings have never been more connected than we are today. A thought written in a bedroom can cross the planet within minutes. A local disagreement can be witnessed by thousands of strangers. A person who would once have spoken to a small circle of friends can now address an audience larger than many towns.
This connection has given us enormous opportunities. We can share knowledge, build communities, discover new ideas, and meet people we never would have encountered otherwise. The internet is not inherently bad. In many ways, it is one of the most powerful things humanity has ever created.
The problem is that our technology has expanded much faster than our ability to emotionally process what it exposes us to.
Human beings developed in relatively small social groups. We learned how to understand people through repeated interaction, shared experiences, body language, reputation, and direct consequences. Research into human social relationships suggests that most people can maintain only around 100 to 200 stable relationships, even when those relationships exist online.
The internet did not remove those cognitive limits. It simply placed millions of people outside those limits directly in front of us.
Every day, we are shown tragedies from cities we have never visited, political arguments between people we have never met, personal disputes we do not understand, and accusations stripped of their original context. Our brains are asked to emotionally respond to more people, more conflicts, and more information than any previous generation had to process.
Eventually, individuals stop looking like complete human beings.
They become usernames, profile pictures, political labels, screenshots, and short collections of statements. We no longer see the person sitting behind the screen. We see a category. A conservative. A liberal. A furry. A Christian. An atheist. A nationalist. A socialist. A fascist. A communist. A supporter. An enemy.
Once a human being has been reduced to a label, empathy becomes easier to discard.
This is where political and social rhetoric becomes dangerous. It is no longer enough to say that someone is mistaken. They must be evil. They cannot merely disagree with us. They must be trying to destroy society. They are not simply another citizen with different experiences and conclusions. They are an existential threat that must be defeated.
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