Our Barnum and Bailey world gets more bizarre every day. Nothing astonishes. My core beliefs, however, are my guides. There’s always a higher way. There’s always a world where we know morality from apostasy, or renunciation of core beliefs.

We’re taught that in school, supposedly, if not successfully at home. Some churches do condemn all violence to our neighbors. Some turn their backs. But the base problem is the vapidity with which culture renounces actual thinking. It doesn’t take much to see which information is false and which is true. One would think. Not.

You’re wondering where Harris is going with all this. We develop awareness on many levels. We all possess a degree of common sense. We all have our own perspectives, we develop our own biases, and we learn from an early age the idea of right and wrong. Then we encounter a world that influences how we perceive and think, and in today’s world, a new term has supplanted what we used to call points of view: the influencer.

I’ve been amused by this latter-day word. Salesman comes to mind or personal opinion, shyster or manipulator. Any number of titles. But the core point being that getting an audience online is the goal. And promoting any particular ideas or beliefs the influencer professes.

We’re lionizing this “new” person with authority, which on examination they may not possess. Celebrities, media personalities, athletes, writers, anybody really, we’re all influencers. But weren’t we always? What’s so different about this iteration?

Answer: We have the megaphone of social media. Everyone is everywhere. Anywhere they want to be. Continually connected to a world swirling in misinformation that in previous times was inaccessible, or selectively researched. It doesn’t take rocket science here. The cult of personality and celebrity is ubiquitous and not new.

This week’s Screenland article in the NYT magazine talks about a nine-month cruise on the gigantic Serenade of the Seas and how it strove to make people as anodyne as possible. Nothing really happens. Only the sensations are addressed.

Again, it’s about image. No wonder contemplating the struggles in Ukraine or Gaza are hard for people, especially in this country, to fathom. We’re far too numbed down. Already you’re saying, “Harris is being unfair or too pessimistic.” It’s not pessimistic if you have any observational chops and have the convictions of your conscience. We all have both.

Anesthetized passengers on the Sovereign of the Seas are not on an ecotour of the planet. They’re on an escape, lulled into a soporific state. Remember everyone can be an influencer? We’re always moments away from becoming relevant. My opinions matter. My wife Jane explained to me her YouTube groups, and I realized how out of step I was at social media.

Next up was an article on eco-terrorism. The interviewer David Marchese interviewed Adreas Malm. Perhaps you read the story in the Times magazine. How to justify unlawful acts in the service of climate justice. The evil side of me was cheering him on. Or was it compassionate because I agreed with him that it was going to take a lot more hell-raising for the consciousness to change?

He was specifically avoiding violence to individuals at least. Attacking infrastructure was actually “taking down a machine that kills people.” Solar panels mean nothing if we build an equal number of coal power plants. Or that a “measured response” takes into account how our democracy works and “whether allowing fossil fuel companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it can count as a form of democracy and should therefore be respected.”

Careful, Harris is getting radicalized. Really? I came up with the response: How self-defeating do people have to be before realizing they’re being duped? When does it become obvious to oneself? When does reality reveal itself?

“But we have more ‘important’ fish to fry, like the next election. What will the Democrats do?” Good question. Right now, the news media is focused on T and the nonexistent primary. I’d like the Dems to produce some real happenings across the country. Get the news media to stop perseverating on unconscionable behavior. Get back to the issues. Get help to Ukraine. Stop sending weapons to Netanyahu. He shoved the two-state solution out the door.

Having just read Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral,” a story about the dissolution of the American family in the ’60s and ’70s, among other things, the fall of a heroic figure, the American everyman who doesn’t comprehend until too late the real world around him, Roth’s imprimatur the Swede, a champion and victim of the American Dream.

Technology has leveled our dreams. Online serendipity, like the lulling of the ship’s passengers, where it’s hard to see what truly matters.

Alan Harris lives in Shelburne Falls.