Hey everyone, hope your weekend is going well.

So, there’s a lot going on in the world. I try to keep this page mostly light (unlike my novels haha), but I feel that as a leader in the writing community, photography community, and on social media in general, it’s my obligation to use my voice in times like these. In the end, all we have is our time and our voice. I’d much rather post an elk photo but not every day is elk day, right?

I want to touch on gullibility, conspiracies, making decisions based on emotion (which I’m sometimes guilty of), and shrinking circles.

If a person finds their circle shrinking, and that they’re “running out of apps to post on”, perhaps it’s time for that person to take a deep breath and to reassess the world around them from a logical, calm standpoint. Maybe, just maybe the reason this person’s world is shrinking is because they’ve fallen for emotion-based ideas, such as unproven conspiracies or unproven doomsday theories. When a person goes “all in” on unproven, unsubstantiated conspiracies, they’re making a decision based on their emotions, not with logic. 

And if a person makes a series of emotion-based decisions, they can sometimes find themselves in a bad spot. Like the recent riot at the U.S. capitol. It’s a snowball effect of bad decisions. And at this point it’s always a good idea to talk less, and read more from a variety of credible sources. To observe. To participate still, but to tilt towards observation amongst that participation.

Are you buying into ideas that you haven’t vetted, or just going along with what family and friends tell you? Are you able to tell the difference between a disguised, manipulative threat and something benign?

A year or so ago, I witnessed someone in my circle (very close, actually) fall for manipulation and threats from their isolated and conspiracy-prone family. This was a very unpopular circle, a fringe circle, prone to wild emotions and unproven conspiracies. For years this person showed me the threatening texts from her family, basically telling her to get her mind right or she’d be left behind by the family and a very angry god, but that they only were saying these things “because we love you”. I couldn’t believe what I was reading at the time. Their texts were so far-flung, that I simply never envisioned this person I knew falling for the manipulative bait.

One week, after this person was ganged up on by members of the fringe sect on a trip, this person changed.  She was literally followed back to her work by them from another city, and coerced into handing in her two week notice. From there she lived for years in her grandma’s basement, being “taught” by this fringe group. During that time, a light flicked off in her eyes, and she started speaking like a robot, of things that were obviously “placed” there through repetition and group pressure by the fringe sect. Threats of being “left behind” from close family members and “love bombing” by strangers ( a common cult tactic) were used on her. I did what I could to pull her out of this fringe group, in fact, Wrigley and I tried to for several months.

But I failed.

Every time this person tried to use her own personality and her own mind again, she was reeled in with “concerned” coffee meetings by  members of this fringe group. This is similar to what we’re seeing by some of the capitol rioters. There’s absolutely a group pressure element in all of this.

In all this pressure, a very unique and promising career had been flushed down the tubes as this person found their circle shrinking. And shrinking, until they were surrounded by nobody except the few people who believed exactly like they did…in fear-based, wild conspiracies, slowly but surely reduced to only a handful of fringe apps in the basement of the internet. A tiny, isolated echo chamber of delusions.

There was nothing I could do.

This personal experience seems to correlate with the recent growth in people who buy into conspiracy theories and cult-like groups without thinking…without vetting. It’s all too easy to just “go with the flow” of the people you’re told to trust. Of people you know the best. But of course, this can often be detrimental,  as we saw last week at the U.S. capitol. And I see the same eyes in those rioters as I saw in my once close friend after the fringe group persuaded her: the eyes of the lost. Eyes with no light.

I long time ago, I fished with my grandma up in Wisconsin’s Northwoods. We’d sit at the end of the pier, holding bamboo poles, watching our bobbers as bald eagles flew overhead.

The sunfish and bluegills had small mouths and rarely swallowed the hook, they were nibblers. The perch, however, always swallowed the bait with abandon. I disliked it. The perch often wouldn’t make it, and twitched or floated to the surface after I released them. The perch took the bait without thinking.

Eventually, I stopped bobber fishing.

So I have to ask. Are you the sunfish or the perch?

Best,

 – Michael