Greed, Hatred and Delusion - Social Media and Ego Infatuation

 In this short piece, I want to tackle the plight of the upsurge of modern social media from a Buddhist point of view. I call it a plight because, nowadays, there is an across-the-board intoxication or reliance on social media to express our thoughts, feelings, emotions and beliefs. Had the Buddha been walking our streets today I can only wonder how he would react to this modern-day, self-obsessed phenomena. It seems like every other day I read in the newspapers about yet another ‘celebrity’ being ‘fat-shamed’, trolled, harassed and having to deal with inflammatory long-windedness.

I think much of what I said in the previous paragraph I might equate to the Buddha’s teaching of the Three Poisons that constitute much of what we would call an ordinary human being. He offered this teaching to cover greed, hatred and delusion and how to handle them in everyday life.

With greed, he refers to our selfishness, our misplaced desires, attachments, and grasping for happiness and satisfaction outside of ourselves. He talks about hatred, this seemingly innate spirit of anger, our aversion and repulsion toward unpleasant people, circumstances, and even towards our own uncomfortable feelings. And thirdly there is delusion that refers to our dullness, bafflement, and fallacies, our wrong views of what constitutes Reality.

These three 'poisons' have been with us from time immemorial. I personally, who has studied Buddhism over a period of 45 years, have lived with them, analysed them from one year to the next, decade after another. So how does one connect the three poisons to current social media trends? Well, let's start off with selfies. Back in the 60s and 70s there wasn't such a thing; you got someone else to take your photo; it could be a holiday snap, maybe in a pub or club, on the beach, at a wedding. That was the way it was. But with the invention and technological advances in mobile phones, we now have people across the world seemingly intoxicated with taking photos of their faces - I would call it delusion. Because are we identifying our 'self' with our face? Delusion, because is my face the real me when I smile, or is it the 'real' me when I frown?

Such is the recent evolution of Internet media and the infatuation with ‘superstars’, celebrities, media heavyweights and narcissists. Just think of Kim Kardashian, Madonna, Kanye West, Donald Trump, and Julian Clary . . . the list goes on. If Kim or Kanye can take selfies, then why can’t I? As for the two KKs just mentioned, they both exemplify the three poisons but especially greed. Why? Because they are divorcing and it’s said that both parties will be filing for a share of their joint worth: $2.7 billion.

So we can see in this pair an excellent example of the three poisons: greed, well that’s obvious; hatred - where there was only deep sympathetic love for each other then, now exists pure, unadulterated hatred. Delusion? Just add the two previous traits - that’s delusion!