But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company. “It’s funny — even if I write a generally positive piece about Apple, I still get more complaints from Apple partisans” than from opponents, Mossberg says. He has even coined a term for the effect. “I call it the Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation.”
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On issues we’re passionate about, we all tend to think our own views are essentially reasonable, Ross explains. Thus when a reporter, editor, news network, or pundit mentions the other side’s arguments, it stings.
“If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it’s partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy,” Ross says. ^
This article is from Farhad Manjoo, whose new book “argues that new communications technologies are loosening the culture’s grip on what people once called ‘objective reality.’” His point is that people polarize themselves, become partisan, and so find anything that does not agree one hundred percent with their views to be from the “other” that opposes them.
It often seems to me like society is breaking up into different special interest groups (SIGs) like a workshop at a conference.
You meet people, even the ones you marry or befriend for life, through your interests. Your interests are under assault by a myriad of marketing and social pressures, because everyone else wants you to see it their way. So you get a tough skin, filter out the other stuff, and focus on what you want.
At some point, you’re unable to see anything but that.
I wonder if this is similar to criminals who seem to think they will never get caught for outrageous and frequently transparent schemes. It’s an interesting development to watch, and seems to correlate to what Tom Wolfe calls the fiction absolute.
The fiction absolute is the idea that, whatever life we’re leading, it’s the best that it can be. Heck, we all need some kind of bedtime reassurances from whatever metaphorical parents or gods we have, saying that we’re on the right path and everything is going to be all right. But at some point, we might be sealing ourselves off from other experience.