Digital Pharisees
The internet wages a grinding war against your critical thinking, but there is one archetype I detest above all: the Digital Pharisee.
I know them well because I was one.
That makes this a cautionary newsletter, so you learn to spot them and avoid becoming one yourself.
If you know your Bible, you can guess where I’m going, but we'll rewind anyway: who were the real Pharisees?
How does this ancient movement have anything to do with modern debate?
The Pharisees were a Jewish socio-religious sect whose influence peaked around the time of Christ. Their main body was of lay scholars and teachers who stressed observance of the Torah and the oral tradition surrounding it, the latter forming conflict with the Sadducees, a rival school of thought.
Most relevant for now is their role in the New Testament.
The Pharisees were antagonists to Jesus; their tension represents the clash between the Old Law and the New, where every criticism prepared a canvas for moral rebuke as taught by Christ.
Many of the Pharisees were legalistic, self-righteous hypocrites who valued technical minutiae and social posturing whilst ignoring the wider spirit of mercy and justice.
They were an early lesson against the corruption innate to any faith: those who were outwardly dutiful but inwardly corrupt.
Below is just one of the ”Woes of the Pharisees”—seven criticisms that expose their internal moral state and teach us to avoid the same thing.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of extortion and rapacity.
You blind Pharisee! First cleanse the inside of the cup and of the plate, that the outside also may be clean.”
- Matthew 23:25-26
The Law is not to be rejected, nor is it a crutch for spiritual deficiency.
The Digital Pharisee
The Pharisees are extinct, but their moral failures persist online.
“Lies take thirty seconds to spread, whereas truth takes thirty minutes to defend, and in a short-form algorithm, you are fighting an upstream current where lies dominate over fact.
It is asymmetric warfare.”
- unknown Twitter anon (i think)
The internet flattens nuance, amplifies cultish acceptance rituals, and uses cheap jabs to undermine—or flat out destroy—constructive discussion.
Virtue signalling is the sin that ties them together—a superficial posture of righteousness to earn social currency, all while avoiding the intellectual struggle behind it.
I have tried to pin down and label some of these shortcomings.
We’ll get onto the remedies after, to regain the critical thinking that was stolen from us.
Wikipedia bites
Criticism itself has become short-form, deforming into what I like to call 'Wikipedia bites' (and it's gotten worse with Google’s AI summary).
