Social Media As Education

I was talking about the fact that when people trigger my instinctive “what am I dealing with here?” on social media a few times, I will cut and paste their most provocative comments, the ones that I think they will later deny, into an alphabetized file. Takes me about 120 seconds a day to do this, and it’s paid off beautifully.

One way is through filtering people according the Three Gates: are they honest? Kind? Is their perspective Useful (informed and of practical value in the discussion at hand)? Do they try to gaslight you?

Sorting though this in real life is an essential part of the Warrior Path: don’t trust people. Rely upon them to do what they see as being in their own best interest. It is up to YOU to learn how to determine this, by sorting through their actions and words to determine their internal belief and value structures. Look for where their words contradict their actions, and ALWAYS trust their actions more. Much more.

It occurred to me that I use Facebook and other social media to help me sharpen that aspect, teaching myself to detect people who are dishonest, unkind, or ineffective. Learning to determine this is just taking responsibility for functioning in the adult world, without which the children are unsafe. I was asked yesterday: “what is evil?” and my simplest answer was: “what harms the children.”

So this is about avoiding evil actions, and evil people.

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