I’ve been exploring “Deep Facebook” Groups and “Deep Reddit” the last couple of weeks and it’s a whole different world than my personal “Leftbook”.

The most basic things that have rough consensus or at least common ground among my friend group regarding politics, society, and not being a complete a-hole do not seem to be universal.

I went deep into the world of fake news, intellectual dishonesty, revisionist history, blatant racism, sexism, homophobia, fascist ideology, and colonial ideology.

Things that seem sensible in my world and in my bubble, are met with ridicule. Words that are used in my world to describe things have a whole different meaning outside of it.

Socialism is a swear word and is akin to satanism to some of these people. “Left” means liberal means an authoritarian state. Fascism is actually a leftist ideology to these people. Colonization is good. War is Peace. Freedom is slavery and so on…okay it wasn’t quite 1984, but it was eerily similar in the level of “doublethink” and looseness with separation of people’s opinions from any sort of supporting evidence.

I don’t like to go there for too long because I value my mental health, but every so often it’s a good thing for me to do, because it forces me to provide support for and challenge even my most basic assumptions. It allows me to see outside my immediate circle and see all of the different (and sometimes frightening) viewpoints. A little poison never hurt…

It allows me to see the biases of humans (including myself), and I come away from my trip realizing that this is not a phenomena restricted to believers in scary-right-wing politics.

I hate to say it because I’m down with a lot of the ideology and the people who are fighting the good fight, but there is quite a bit of the same type of intellectual dishonesty among liberals and those on the left, faulty logic and rationality when coming to conclusions, and confirmation bias when selectively seeking evidence to back up what people already believe.

We need our views to be flexible, to allow for new information and to be constantly putting our views to the test, and taking in new information and reading of history from various perspectives, otherwise we will fall into a dangerous mental state that leads us away from truth. We need to practice our critical thinking skills, and learn how to discern truth from fiction, otherwise we fall further into collective confusion and disarray.

Finally, WE ARE BEING FUCKING PLAYED!! There are top-down structures in place that disseminate prejudice, racism, hatred for our brothers and sisters, false binaries, fake history, and egocentric ways of living that pit us against each other, while corporations and power-hungry individuals and groups seize power.

It’s the most basic trick in the Art of War, and if there is any hope to take these people out of power, the now-deep-seated damage must be undone, we must heal from our brainwashing, and we must learn to come together so we can live as humans were meant to live again, together.