Truth Died. It Had Too Many Followers.

I just stopped scrolling through social media because I just had to. The level of ignorance being passed off as "new wisdom" and "actual truth" was just getting to me.

This isn’t a political statement. It’s a commentary on where we are as a society.

We love to say “Knowledge is power.” And history proves it. Societies have been controlled by who holds the information and who’s allowed to access it. Wars have been fought not over actual truth, but over whose version of the truth would win. People haven’t historically searched for truth—they’ve sought to enforce their own version of it on everyone else.

For most of human history, knowledge had to be earned. You studied, apprenticed, sacrificed. It was hard won, and because of that, it was treasured. Knowledge was something you possessed while many others did not. You went away to schools, undertook extraordinary journeys, and even climbed high mountains to attain it. Today, we live in a world where information is freely available at the tap of a screen. That should be a blessing. Instead, it’s becoming a curse.

The easier it is to access, the less value it seems to hold. You don’t have to work for it. You don’t have to understand it. You just Google it and go. And that has created a society where people confuse having access to information with actually knowing something.

And then it gets worse. The answers that come up first aren’t always right. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they’re half-true, conveniently biased, or engineered to promote a particular agenda. And in far too many cases, they’re coming from people who’ve built a platform, not earned authority. People who call themselves experts, but who’ve never done the deep work. And ironically, their loudest message is often: “Don’t trust the people who’ve spent their lives learning this. Trust me instead.” And this is why truth died. It had too many followers.

Once upon a time, every village had an idiot. Now the idiots have Wi-Fi and followers. They’ve found each other online, and they’ve formed echo chambers. And those echoes are getting louder.

This is what makes our “information age” so dangerous. Not just the bad information itself, but the fact that it’s free—and therefore easy to dismiss. When knowledge costs nothing, people treat it like it’s worth nothing.

It's easy to be shallow when you've never had to swim in deep waters. It’s easy to be loud when all you need is signal strength, not substance.

When you’re searching for something that matters—something beyond trivia or directions to Disneyland—please don’t take the first thing you read as gospel. Don’t crown the first influencer you find as a sage. Getting a “doctorate” from WebMD doesn’t make someone a doctor. And why would you trust a total stranger with your health or your mind when you wouldn’t even trust your own family with your Netflix password?

I guess what I’m really trying to say here is look deeper, read more, question what you find—and then question your questions. If we don’t learn to think critically again as a society, we’re heading into a second Dark Age. But this time, the ignorance won’t be from a lack of information—it’ll be from drowning in it.

So before you cross the busy intersection of modern knowledge, make sure you look both ways.