The problem is, how pacifically.

“Our saving grace today is that, currently, dynamics of collective violence play out mostly over keyboards, in a kind of live-action role-playing of ancient collective murder. An open question is whether digital pacification is a sustainable sublimation or an unsustainable suppression."

“Perhaps the digital sphere is like a rubber band that is further extended every year, until it will unavoidably snap with unprecedented social force, revealing itself to be not a pacifying impediment but a grand incubator of collective violence."

There is a guy who believes that this “digital pacification” will very likely end like that but, for this very reason, is “overwhelmingly optimistic”. Here is why:

• “Most people do not care much whether they coordinate on truth or delusion, as long as it’s easy and they are able to carry on with their lives."
• “In the long run, groups that coordinate on the truth always beat groups that coordinate on collective delusion."
• “if you don’t have a missionary zeal to coordinate on increasingly implausible collective delusions that change by the week, you will be forced to coordinate on the truth."
• “One should be rather grateful to these lost souls who give others ethical license to leave them behind."

My two pacificating cents

It is hard to argue that there is a lot of digital pacification going on in western societies, and that it cannot last forever. Unless the Matrix really came to physically isolate from pollution, climate change, pandemics and so on all us human batteries. I agree that digital pacification is a rubber band. Don’t forget it is.

Finding what “the truth” actually is… shouldn’t be a problem. I am sure you will agree on that, won’t you?

Therefore, the only challenge remains how to make “the truth” win without bloodbaths, or other large scale sufferings. Especially when you realize the major flaw in the quotes above: even if it were ethical, which it definitely is not, that “ethical license to leave [delusional souls] behind” would not work in practice.

There will be no happy enclaves of survivalist, “preppers” truth-followers if today’s digital pacification really ends up in that way. Not for more than a few years.