Like, Unlike 11-18-10

Anderson, South Carolina

In Roman arenas spectators of gruesome gladiatorial contests were granted rights to pass judgment on the merits of contestants’ performance. Thumbs up and fighters would be granted their lives. Thumbs down and gladiators would not make it off the field. Spectators, voyeurs of violence if you may, were granted life and death powers over combatants in the guise of enhancing the entertainment value of these grisly games.

During the past couple of years a curious phenomenon has swept the cyber world. Little blue ‘LIKE’ and “UNLIKE’ buttons are showing up all over cyberspace. We flat-screen observers are increasingly granted the ability to give a thumb’s up or down on most anything we encounter. Our friends ask us to view a U-Tube video of their children playing violin and vote for them. Scholarships are gained or lost in these public straw polls. Somehow our viewing a two-minute video clip is supposed to make us expert judges of musical ability. Studio audiences and TV viewers are granted rights of judgment over contestants in wide-ranging talent and reality shows. Careers and fortunes are made or lost according to the mercurial whims of the audience at hand. Increasingly, holders of high political office are subject to escalating levels of judgment by the rank and file.

We like or unlike everyone and everything around us. We move further into a behavioral dynamic where we are ever busy judging and critiquing everything. This has become so intense as to allow opinion to be more powerful than ethics or morals at guiding our lives. The opinion of a single person will make or break virtually every entertainer or author in the world, especially if her name is Oprah. Obscure authors are made into best seller millionaires in ninety seconds of ‘O’ time, even if by objective measures their work should remain obscure. One author sold millions of books because a copy of one of his works unwittingly ended up on Oprah’s night stand at the right time. Courses are offered, teaching wishful authors how to get their books noticed by Oprah.

Those of us teaching courses in universities are regularly subjected to student evaluations; often resembling little more than popularity score cards. Compiled results frequently demonstrate an amazing level of harshness among those given this sudden sense of power over authority figures. It’s most fortunate we are not gladiators.

Computer users pass judgment on the veracity of heartfelt comments made by people about events occurring around the world. Forums, chat rooms, social networks, and news sites provide opportunities to give thumbs up or down on content, reactions to content, and reactions to reactions. The venomous acerbic responses often rendered to perfectly reasonable comments are dumb founding. Have we really become this heartless, brazen in the anonymity granted us in cyber space? Is this any different than the increasing road rage than emerges as collective anonymity increases on the road?

Social networks have recently added the ability of users to declare their like or unlike for anything added, embedded, inserted, created or otherwise placed in the ethos of the cyber world. The ability for me to ‘like’ or ‘unlike’ your photographs, words, music, or your person is instantly available. Embedded links make it possible for users to declare their like or unlike your place of business. Enough ‘unlikes’ on a social network and a struggling restaurant will close its doors. Enough low user ratings and films will fail to regain their production costs; legendary studios will close. Delightful motels I’ve stayed in have been excoriated in cyber-space. Magnificent films that enthralled me have melted into obscurity.

Perhaps most sobering is what happens when people are “UNLIKED”. Recently a number of high school and college students have been subject to being unliked in the most extreme ways. Webcams, streaming, social networks, chat rooms, texting, and e-mail have been used to disparage the character and values of these victims; bullying so intense as to cause these targets to opt out of life via suicide. In America we now have a high school known as the bully school. An epidemic of large-scale school shootings suggest we have far more than one of these.

A young man living next door to me was much like a recent Rutgers University bully victim, profoundly gifted in music and visual arts, gentle and compassionate. For years Harold called me his ‘chosen father.’ Bullied in his governor’s school by faculty, he was wounded profoundly in his soul. Ultimately he opted for relief with a shotgun he bought at Wal-Mart. I saw up close what shotguns do to people at point blank range. I was on an assortment of psychotropic drugs for years.

I again find myself an unwitting victim of this LIKE UNLIKE culture I’m immersed in. Last night I was told I was on a “do not invite” list, a list being maintained by one who was once an important part of my life. A few weeks ago I was told publically by another I was now on such a list. As much as I want to tell myself it doesn’t matter at all to me, it matters a whole lot. Opportunities to spend time with people who have been important to me have been lost because I committed some perceived faux pas. This is pathognomonic of a throw-away culture in which we throw away our spouses, neighborhoods, friends, employers, churches, and our consumer goods, simply because they don’t behave and perform as we demand. It hurts. A lot.

Psychiatric disorders are catalogued in what is known as DSM-IV, a huge clinical book containing thousands of diagnoses along with descriptions and methods for diagnosing patients with these. Recently, Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) and Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED) have emerged as an objective diagnoses. Individuals with these are prone to explosive, even violent outbursts, when others do not behave as expected. RAD and IED are simply powerful ways to unlike someone in an extreme manner.

In the worlds of addiction and alcoholism I encounter these frequently. Alas, they crop up with regularity throughout the social landscape, in volunteer groups, churches, social clubs, work places, at birthday parties, and most recently in cyber space. Outbursts have been made socially acceptable in the cyber world with the advent of ‘unlike’, ‘un-friend’, and ‘delete’ buttons. It’s too easy to simply click and move on; leaving behind a contrail of bewildered wounded individuals and shuttered businesses.

For some, the emotional cost of living in a judging culture, devoid of loyalty or compassion, is too much. They go to ‘Sporting Goods’ in Wal-Mart and make their last purchase. They carry out the ultimate UNLIKE on themselves. When my neighbor ended his life he left behind an oil painting he had been working on. In the middle of the chaotic image was the phrase, “I hate myself.”

During the Cold War, the collective ‘we’ often wondered about who had his finger over the button that could cause a white flash to occur 8,000 miles away, immolating millions in atomic holocaust. Today I wonder who they are with their fingers over the UNLIKE button that can unleash emotional and financial holocaust in our lives.

It might be a good idea to shut down your computer and go visit your lonely neighbors across the street. They probably need you to LIKE them.

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.”

Not even the UNLIKE button.