Mass Voluntary Mind Numbing.

No coercion needed.

They say knowledge is power and people these days seem to want as much access to information as they can get. They follow others on social media accounts. By the hundreds, or thousands. They follow people politically. They follow analysts. They read self-help books. How to get ahead. How to make friends and influence people. Accumulate a lot of information.

But information is not power.

Knowledge is power.

Because a lot of the information that's out there right now is not contributing to knowledge. It's just information. And much of the information that's flowing around at this time is simply repackaged slightly and dished up on a different plate. So let me give you an example. Over the last week I looked on a certain social media platform (that I'm trying to get off completely and I'm almost there...I don't post much on it anymore) and a story flashed up. A suggested story for me.

And it was something very simple. It was Donald Trump being asked if he would be endorsing JD Vance, or he thought JD Vance would be the next presidential nomination at the next election.

And flat out, without any hesitation, Trump said no.

And this was a little video clip, maybe about 60 seconds long. And the contents of the clip are quite irrelevant. Let's be honest about it. We've just started 2025. Who can tell what 2028 may bring? Or 2027? Or 2026? Or the second half of 2025? Or even next week? Even tomorrow? Who can tell what a day will bring?

But already we have people talking about something that may or may not happen in another 3-4 years time. And that in and of itself is not the point that I'm trying to make. The point is that on this suggested news item, and it's not a news item, it's just a throwaway statement as part of a long, rambling interview that someone has deemed it necessary to latch onto, is not knowledge, it's information. And then they upload that information and someone else sees it and they re-post it or they copy it, they plagiarise it, they rip it for themselves, they put their own little slant on it. And before you know it, you have page after page after page after page of a legion of people saying the same thing over and over again in slightly different ways.

And it's nothing. It's nothing.

You're getting bombarded with this information, not knowledge. And that's just one example. Another one was the Super Bowl that’s just been and gone. I didn't even know it was happening. And I only know about it again because of suggestions that came up alongside the other one I just used as an example.

I stayed long enough to get two news suggestions.

The second one was to do with Donald Trump (again) being cheered at the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift being booed. And the videos were showing her on a wide screen with a shocked expression on her face as people were booing her. People were talking about it being the end of Woke in America. Do you really think she cares about being booed at the Super Bowl? I think not. I don't know anything about her. I don't know if she's happy or if she's not. But she can do what she wants. She can disappear from public view if she wants.

She says or does nothing of any consequence at all and yet people are concerned, excited even, about her reaction at the Super Bowl to some fans booing her at a football game where men run around on a pitch chasing a ball filled with air.

That is not knowledge. That is just simply information. Useless, throwaway information.

So I encourage you, and I'm encouraging myself, to seek knowledge, to deepen your understandings of the way systems work in this world. Learn something new. Pursue something that interests you. Something that stimulates you. Not this incessant blandness and nothingness that's spouted out from every source or just listening to the same people saying the same thing over and over again, week in, week out, month in, month out, year in, year out, just going round the merry-go-round.

So your consumption of news, for example, should be like your diet; the physical diet that you have, the food that you put into your body. It should be nutritious. It should be healthy. It should not be processed and full of additives, or e-numbers, any extra salt. Wherever possible.

And from time to time, you indulge yourself in something sweet or maybe something savoury, something that would be deemed to be unhealthy, but just from time to time.

So adopt that strategy with what you're consuming through your eyes and your ears, what you're following, what you're absorbing. Is it knowledge or is it information? Decide and go from there.