Wars and simpletons

There are plenty of poor deluded souls: a great many, far too many.
You see them squaring off in two camps of public opinion, artfully manufactured on the battlefield of a conflict, a feud, or a dispute.
With the stubborn certainty of a mule, they always know who's right and who's wrong. Each side accuses the deluded on the equally bogus opposing side of naïveté or malice. They charge the other camp with being enslaved to propaganda, and they wave around the sources lined up on their own side as the keepers of pure truth.
They root for their team, putting on that pathetic and irritating air of misunderstood analysts.
The tragicomic twist in all this is that they're right. Every one of them is right. The accusations they hurl at the "enemies" are true. They're true on both sides, though.

The reason for this idiotic polarization is well known: the inability, typical of certain simple minds, to handle chaos, the complexity inherent in every area of reality, not just social but also anthropological, biological, natural. It's a complexity they deal with every day in their miserable little lives, yet paradoxically can't accept when it comes to events unfolding at a higher level, and therefore an even more complicated one.

We could watch them with tenderness and leave them to wallow in their pathetic little simplified kiddie pool for children who can't swim in rough water.
The problem is that their numbers aren't negligible. They're massive, and so they influence the society the rest of us have to live in too. Those who wield power, whether political, media, or financial, know this and act accordingly, feeding the polarized explanations to these self-proclaimed sharp minds. That way, power slips out from under the oversight needed to make it do its job for the benefit of the community rather than itself.
It's the "divide et impera" of Roman memory. Still extremely relevant and effective today.
Unfortunately, it's a self-reinforcing spiral, a vicious circle, an almost irreversible trend.

Still, we have a duty (moral, human, sacred in a secular sense) to keep trying. If it turns out to be in vain, at least we'll have nothing to blame ourselves for.
And if it ends in catastrophe, we'll be able to point the finger and say: "We told you so!" A slim consolation is always better than fat and base inaction.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.