The world is at war.

There and principalities and powers, sure, but there is also a war of language, a war of information, and a war on attention. Rather, a war for your attention.

It’d be easy to just say we aren’t, to be lost in the whirlpool of distractions, but if we really slow down and strip away the excuses, have we become the pawns and commodities of the conflict?

In the echo chambers of information, are we just clanging symbols and noisy gongs?

Hammers can be used for building up or tearing down. They can be used for good and for evil. Ships can be sailed for exploration and adventure, or they can be sailed for piracy and mayhem.

Let me get this out of the way: this is not an anti-screen post.

Rather, screens and phones and tablets and laptops and the internet are inert tools.

This is a post about distraction and attention. While this is an assumption, based on the fruit, I’d say most of us are eating from the tree. Laws are being enacted trying to put some reigns on a beast that can no longer be controlled. The Instagram algorithm decreed I should see this comic from Stephen Collins.

Words have power. We’re in an attention economy, constantly being marketed to. The first time I remember actually seeing this was in 2001, back in the days of playing Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee on the original Xbox. In the game, there were vending machines that gave out SoBe drinks, if anyone remembers those. I never drank them, but I distinctly remember wanting to try one afterwards. It was then I realized marketing works. Think about it. What could make you want an energy drink more than seeing someone else smiling as they’re sipping on that sweet, sweet nectar in a 12oz or 16oz aluminum can? Admit. You’re thinking about driving to the gas station to get one and cracking it open right now. Word of mouth is the best marketing influence there is.

Word of mouth at the speed of the internet also creates a wildfire of online fads. How easy is it to get sucked into the whirlpool of these things? There’s always a war or rumor of war or a conspiracy that is meant to drive clicks or a conspiracy that proves to be true. It’s news flying at us at a breakneck speed that gives us whiplash more than it keeps us informed.

We have two dogs. They both use their tails to express their emotions. You can determine if they’re happy or sad or excited by seeing how their tails are wagging or if their tails are tucked between their legs. It is the dog who wags its tail. The tail does not wag the dog. It is not the tail who is running the show, unless someone were to learn how to use the lesser to control the greater. The tail could wag the dog if it were to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. There are laws against this. Why? Populations can be controlled through words, a words spread like wildfire.

It’s common for organizations to provide training on phishing, malware, and other kinds of cyber security. One of the ways malicious individuals make it past these security systems is to directly approach individuals to click links, open emails, etc. We have these attacks to thank for the widespread inconvenience of multi-factor authentication. These behaviors fall under the category of social engineering. According to my quick internet search, Copilot tells me that Social engineering is the art of exploiting human psychology to manipulate individuals into divulging confidential information or performing actions that compromise their security. How can you be certain that the news and events of the world and wars and rumors of war are real or fake or legit or AI generated? I'm not saying everything is a conspiracy, but I am questioning how we can know if any of those events are true or not? Click here to learn more about social engineering.

In 1997, the brilliant and dark satire Wag the Dog was released. One of the taglines for the movie describes it as “a comedy about truth, justice, and other special effects.”

Almost 30 years later with deepfakes being more part of our conversation than ever, it’s difficult to not be cynical. The truth is that there are some people who have learned to ignite wildfires by igniting sparks of the tongue. Words light fires and, conveniently, also allow the tail to wag the dog. As I said in the beginning, we are in a war of words and language and information. Our wars are OVER words and language and information. What words are free and what speech should be controlled and who is to say if ANY limits should be put on anything? Add into the mix that influencers have learned to use AI to generate content that acts like tinder to the sparks of cultural flash points, and information spreads that we can’t have any assurance is even factually true. I still believe a lot it true, but there’s also a lot of smoke and mirrors. Some for self-interested monetization, but some motivated by guile to intentionally yell “FIRE!” in a theater. Whatever the motivation, people still respond. The tail still wags the dog. Even worse, all of this is manipulated to distract from the fact that they or someone they’re buddies with yelled fire. “Look at this thing instead!” That is effectively the plot of Wag the Dog. Then the arguing and mobs start rolling. It doesn’t even have to be about world events. It takes place in reviews and the comments section of content. All of that doesn’t even take into account the onslaught of ads that relentlessly pursue us. We are being overwhelmed.

Take the recent appearance of Jim Carrey, or what might not have been Jim Carrey, at a film awards ceremony in Paris. Basically, Jim Carrey comes out of seclusion to offer up a speech at the ceremony, and viral fights breakout online if it’s the real Jim Carrey or if he’d been replaced. Then the following weekend, a makeup artist posts on his Instagram that he claimed to be the one impersonating Jim Carrey. There are claims some of the photos are AI while other comments are lamenting how the spent so much time defending that it WAS Jim Carrey. This article by LadBible does a decent job of covering it. After all of that, Jim Carrey‘s agent released a statement saying Jim was in fact the one delivering the speech, and he worked very hard to deliver it in French. I don’t know. I’m not spending much of my brain power on this because it’s exactly the type of tail wagging the dog thing I’m talking about. When it comes to news and what’s true and wars and rumors of wars, I’m not saying those events aren’t important. I’m saying who can know what’s true anymore. I’m growing to be very agnostic about what’s happening outside of my near proximities. It’s non-stop noise and the people closest to us are suffering because of what we’re no longer giving them. We are losing each other.

The constant argumentation and fracturing makes the echo chambers we’re in more akin to a coin in a metal coffee can. It’s loud and obnoxious and no one wants to listen anymore. When we walk up to one another and start rattling our echo chamber coffee cans, how productive is it, really? We’re creating our own relational wastelands. We no longer see one another. Maybe we see the caricatures of another, but we don’t see them. The echo chambers have left us wandering in the desert, noise addled wastelands devoid of blessing and the rivers of life. The thirst is real out there.

When was the last time you saw the person you were face to face with? I mean REALLY saw them. You slowed down enough to stop rattling the can and asked, “How are you?” When was the last time you genuinely wanted to know? You were genuinely interested in them and what spiked their interests? When did you accept an invitation into their world or extended them an invitation into yours? You tell yourself that you do care, but do you act like you care or do you just say it? To ease the pressure a bit, it is difficult to care when we’re inundated by the rapid tsunami waves of information about a world beyond the boundaries of what’s right in front of us.

There are important things happening in the world. I’m not saying there aren’t. I’m not advocating for myopic vision. I’m not saying you should avoid the topics of religion and politics in conversation. In a world where information and attention are currency, integrity is at an all-time low, and there’s no possible way any of us can have the omniscience to know if someone is wagging the dog for a diversion or wagging the dog in a game of 4D chess, how distracted can we get to where we forget that God has placed real people right in front of us? We have been given real families, real neighbors, real coworkers.

What’s God’s will for our country? Who knows. We should cease being evil lest we further ask for His wrath to be on us. Being the devil’s useful idiots to be so caught up in what’s happening in the world that we forget to be caught up in the people we’ve been put next to is a real shuck and jive move to make us ineffective. When we become another clanging coffee can in a world of noise, no one wants to listen anymore. It’s already loud and that clanging hurts our already ringing ears.

Can’t we just sit and be still together?

Can’t we stop and see each other?

I don’t know a single person who isn’t experiencing some kind of suffering. Loving God and loving them, self-sacrificially, with time and energy and effort and remembrance that they exist in an environment that’s louder than they are is how the world is going to be made quiet and still and sane again.

What has the Lord called us to in His Word?

That mission does go to the ends of the earth, but it has to start somewhere. The point of the battle we face daily is where we become most ineffective. What we believe politically won’t make a lick of difference if we’re looking past the people in front of us to ready the chariots and trumpet the war horns and, most importantly, post about it online to strangers.

This entire post is about focus and attention and priorities. We can’t have any of that if we don’t set our sights.

The extent of what we see in the world has grown large. I’m not advocating for you to check out or put your head in the sand.

It may be a wasteland five states over, it may not be. I don’t know. The politicians and world leaders and reporters and news anchors and influencers and newsletters writers may be on the up and up, or they may be wolves in sheep’s clothing. I don’t know. Prominent figures may share your values and faith, or they may not. I don’t know.

What I do know is that God has placed us in the lives of neighbors. Our closest neighbor’s are our spouse and children and parents. We have physical neighbors next to us who are afflicted with illness and their grass grows long but instead of asking them if we can help, we send them a passive aggressive letter through the HOA. We have co-workers. We have those at church, those we play sports with, those whose name’s we know at stores we frequent. Our closest neighbors are fighting hidden battles, and if we do not see them due to the disproportionate effort we’re putting into uncovering and fighting truths or untruths about those who are NOT indeed our neighbors, well then… I fear we will have missed something vitally important for which we will have to give an account to God about.

Wars and rumors of wars may abound. We have a neighbor to love.

And if we don’t know what the love of God is like, we will never be able to love our neighbors.

Stay Anchored and keep fighting the good fight,

~ J.P. Simons ⚓️

PS: If you haven’t already ordered it, please check out my first book, Pray Then Plow: Practical Steps For Men Who Won’t Give Up.

I promise I do not intentionally line these deep dives with Screwtape up prior to writing…

“It makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing provided that meetings, pamphlets, polices, movements, causes and crusades matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity.”

If you’re still concerned with all of the events occurring outside of our reach, C.S. Lewis has so may good things to say in his essay Life in the Atomic Age. How shall we live if the bombs may drop at any moment?