A word from Officer K: The men who knew too much

If you seek a monument for our overloaded moment in time, look in the toothpaste aisle.

The toothpaste aisle of your average grocery store has something between one and two dozen different brands and varieties of toothpaste. Eyes cross, corneas glaze over. Which one? And why?

Now comes the grand irony: just about all of them are completely interchangeable. The overwhelming majority of differences between toothpastes amount to flavor and marketing.

The flood of information that threatens to drown us from all sides is about as bad as the toothpaste aisle. The problem is that not all information is as interchangeable as toothpaste.

And most of it promotes truth decay.

(Sorry, I had to get that pun in.)

Some of the information we're inundated with daily is important and constructive. Some of it is marketing hype. Some of it is malicious disinformation. But again, the same problem arises: How to choose? And to what end?

And most importantly: How can we deal with this deluge of pressing details about literally every corner of our world without going completely bonkers?

At no other time in our history have we been so acutely, painfully conscious of everything that is happening to us, in near-real-time. Every melting glacier, every police truncheon splitting open a bystander's head, every snide politician's fabrication, every glib celebrity statement -- even those of us who aren't social media campers have this relentless rataplan of details drilled into us from all sides.

And what has all this done for us? Has it made us more empathic towards our fellow human being, more attuned to what needs to be done to make our world less terrible? Nope. It's left us shellshocked and shaking. It's left us wondering how there can possibly be people who sit benumbed in front of their TVs willfully absorbing this dentist-drill attack of noise on their spirits. Who would want this? And why do we seem to be only interested in building a world where there is more of it, not less?

How did we even get to this position, anyway?

Let's wind back to my childhood, the late 1970s / early 1980s. The most common forms of news at the time were daily newspapers (like the venerable, now lamentable, New York Times, for which my family had a subscription), TV evening news (Walter Cronkite, and later Dan Rather), and news-radio outlets like New York's 1010 WINS. Only the last one of them had anything like a 24/7 "news cycle". And even then it wasn't the "news cycle" of modern cable news; it was essentially a loop of news played throughout the day and updated maybe twice a day -- basically, the equivalent of a morning paper plus an evening extra. There was no internet, no social media, no services like Reddit. One dose of news a day was what most of us got, and we got it in a fairly controlled, one-way form.

The first big change: CNN. Suddenly, the evening news was a non-stop thing. And it wasn't just a loop of cutting away from an anchor at a desk to someone out in the field with a microphone. It was a lively procession of what amounted to the video version of newspaper opinion columnists. It felt dynamic, more like the conversational formats of Firing Line or Meet The Press, only round the clock. Staid old TV news didn't have anything on this.

Then came the internet -- at first in the form of costly dial-up, pay-per-minute services, and then high-speed cable or fiber to the house. And with that came another transformation in the way news could be packaged and delivered. Not just because TV news or the newspapers now had another delivery mechanism, but because the whole thing now worked both ways. We could engage in near-real-time, and feel like we were part of the goings-on (even if we were still just spectators). Social media, from Twitter on out, amplified that even further.

We weren't watching the news any more. We were the news. Not just in the sense that we could put our lives out there and have it be a spectacle, but in that we could have back-and-forth pattern with this whole class of people who used to forever remain behind the walls of print or the glass of the TV screen. It made us feel like we were actually part of history, not just spectators to it.

But it wasn't true.

We were still spectators. Just spectators with better seats.

If you have tickets to the Chicago Bulls and you're up in the bleachers, that's one thing. If you are sitting right next to the court, that's another. Not just because you get a nose-to-nose view of the players, but because you're literally rubbing shoulders with other VIPs.

But you are still not in the game, and you have no control over the game. You're still just a spectator.

We know too much because we thought wading hip-deep into all this would empower us. We though it would close the feedback loop between us and history. All it did was close the feedback loop around us, make us more dependent on it for some sense of validation.

That's why we look at the 6-3 Supreme Court rulings and feel so angry and powerless. Or why we ball our fists whenever the supremely punchable face of the insufferable Senator Ted Cruz appears.

We forgot that the elation we feel in being so close to the goings-on of the world, the electricity of being plugged-in and all-knowing, is not a sustainable high. And that the ones who feed us this high have more invested in making us psychologically, if not chemically, dependent on our elation-to-misery-and-back-again cycle. Most of us hate this, but can't tear ourselves away from it.

Because we know too much.

We know too much, because we got tricked into thinking "staying informed" would somehow also equate to "being prepared to deal".

We know too much, because we have been allowed to mistake projection and bias for analysis and facts, and our emotions are taken for a ride as a result.

We know too much, because we have been terrorized into being afraid of knowing too little. Because we now believe that the only way to be informed is to be terrified.

We know too much because we don't want to believe ignorance is bliss.

Ignorance isn't bliss. But knowledge is not terror, either.

Slowly, here and there, people are figuring out how to disentangle being informed from being terrorized. Some of that involves pushing back against the cupidity and corruption of those we trusted with keeping us informed. Other times that involves building mini-networks of support (like the Bar) and keeping them well-stocked with resources and strategies for how to make sense of what's on offer (see: Teri Kanefield).

The common element, though, is resisting the easy answers, the cheap highs.

We don't need to know everything. We just need to know the right things. We need to know what truth is available, no matter what spin gets put on it. We need to know what concrete actions we can take to empower that truth. And we need to know that there are others like us, near enough that we can touch hands, through which we can share this need and give it support.

We have more of this now than we did even a couple of years ago. But it will not multiply on its own. It needs us to defend it and give it places to grow. It needs nurturing so that we can take back our sense of engagement with the world.

Because some things aren't as interchangeable as toothpaste.