Cringe suppresses the truth-tellers: the chaotic, creative idiots who gleefully prod us to reassess what we think we know and believe. It raises the cost of taking risks and makes it socially expensive to stray outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

There is no wishing away the existence of the public online web. If we don’t like what we see, we simply have to learn how to engage with it more deeply and meaningfully. We must pick up a paintbrush, find a blank canvas, and paint the world as we wish it to be. Instead of hiding in our safe and quiet communities, we need to summon the courage to s

Girard believes that mimetic conflict is resolved by scapegoats, but as we’ve seen, they don’t help unify a fragmented landscape of disparate communities, because one man’s scapegoat is another’s martyr.

But this reminds me of the social media addicts who cycle through deleting and re-installing apps on their phone, instead of learning to cultivate a fluid sense of control in the world they’ve been given.

Culture wars intensify when too many competing ideas are jostling for limited paths to change, which is why improving the speed and efficiency of institutional response becomes critically important during “(culture) wartime.”

If an idea spreads too quickly, it might escape its original context; its meaning could become distorted, and pushback could be so strong that it destroys the idea altogether.

Group chats are a place to build trust with likeminded people, who eventually amplify each others’ ideas in public settings.

Private spaces are where we get to refine ideas and strengthen relationships, but public spaces are the highway where those ideas zip around in hopes of being adopted and, eventually, brought to life in the physical world.

The short-term memory of college campuses works in favor of administrators on internal issues like tuition costs, management of the endowment, or campus conduct.