Social media are the mass media is social media

In the past decade, the social media have become massive, dominant, and many or most of the younger population are addicted - and spend most of their discretionary time connected up.

(Note: in The West, young now implicitly refers to below median age - which means younger than forty-five.)

Does this mean that social media are replacing mass media and user-generated content is overthrowing journalistic manipulations? Is the fact that professional mass media journalism is collapsing as a career (if that is a fact), evidence that the public are coming to their senses and thinking for themselves?

Well - take a look! Has the advent of social media reversed, stopped or in the slightest slowed-up the socio-political trends (away from religion, towards leftism, in favour of ever-more sexual revolution) that were established before social media?

Of course not! These decades long trends are obviously continuing, obviously getting worse!

We need to recall the spiritual warfare we are engaged in; and what is the real nature of 'the game'.

We need to consider whether God, or Satan, would be most pleased by the fact that nearly-everybody spends nearly-all their time connected by and communicating with social media? Would God, or Satan, be most encouraged by this trend?

Those who regard social media as a step in the right direction and hope for the future are deluding themselves with dreams of what might be, rather than insight into what is actually happening en masse - much like those of us, and I was one of them, who said the same thing about the internet leading to a truthful public discourse.

Don't get distracted from the real game, the real battle, the real war - which is spiritual and not of this world.

Accept the possibility (which I regard as near certainty - but you only need to accept it as a possibility...) that these are the end times - the latter days; and that Christians are very probably not going to win in this world, overall, in this dispensation.

But we will (certainly) win in the bigger picture of post-mortal life, and in the long term of eternity (if we are true).

We are not fighting to save 'the world' when the world does not want to be saved - wants not to be saved, and indeed regards the whole topic of Christianity as not just ridiculous but evil.

Our job is not to win an unwinnable war (using enemy troops!) but to win souls - actual, specific people including ourselves!

It looks to me (and I have personal experience of this) that worldly fights to beat secular Leftism on its own ground (i.e. fights to beat them solidly, permanently, in the arena of public discourse) often leads Christians into hard-heartedness, pride, and sometimes hatred when it becomes gradually clear that this kind of victory against overwhelming odds is not possible, and not wanted.

The Christian fight against Secular Leftism is not perceived to be a war of liberating victims from a tyrannical oppressor - because the victims are as corrupted as the oppressors, the victims are willingly victimizing themselves, the oppressed are fighting to stay oppressed because they prefer it.

Leftist oppression is successful at portraying itself as freedom, because the great bulk of Western people do not want to be free - they merely want not to be identified as sinful. They want a nihilistic world view because they don't want divine order.

The Western Masses believe only in this mortal life, and in the reality of the virtual world of the mass media - the modern idea of immortality is not resurrection and life everlasting in the New Jerusalem; but (e.g.) to have one's characteristic brain patterns downloaded onto an unbounded supercomputer. In practice this means that nothing really matters overall and in the long term; nothing is more significant than the latest whatever. 

The Western masses want evil because they have chosen to reject the possibility of good, because good is a constraint, good is not what they personally want now, good must be worked-with and not re-defined, good is a real and heavy personal responsibility. 

All this on average and as a general tendency - and nothing can be done (at least not directly) by you or I to confront, defeat and reverse the big picture of recent history in the modern West.

But our job as Christians is to help those who want to be helped - and to do that means ensuring that we ourselves are a proper example of warm heartedness, courage, love.

If fighting and campaigning is interfering with that - if it is corrupting us personally - then we must stop: we must not do it.

If alliance-building is diluting and clouding and confusing our understanding, or causing anything less than total honesty of Christian seeking and expression - then we must stop: we must not do it.

The end does not justify the means - rather, the end flows from the means.

It is not our job to define the end - but it is our job (and nobody else can do it) to seek and maintain the goodness of our souls. On this matter: No Compromise.