I think the most powerful reason you would ever state you are concerned about someone "poisoning minds" is that you know, whether you wish to state it explicitly or not, that people are dumb as fuck and your own mind has been poisoned.
Joe Rogan is a moron. Joe Rogan has always been a moron. If you're worried that the moron is telling other morons to take advice and find commonalities with Alex Jones, Aaron Rogers, or other morons, you gotta move on through to accepting the depth of the moron pool we're swimming in.
Then what? What's your responsibility if this is the environment? Upvote the reddit post? Complain? Hashtag campaign? Traditionally, it seems you forget to vote, fail to organize, refuse to create systems or long-term accountable intelligent competitive environments. We've taken our institutions, history, and barely-true story of ourselves for granted. Trump, the nationalism around the globe, idiots like Rogan: these are the natural consequences of y/our bullshit.
You want "things" to be better and trust that the conversational or intellectual pollutants don't reach deadly toxic levels? Stop enabling them. Don't listen, first. Don't ignore the reasons they take hold and get popular. Don't stop asking yourself how you're complicit or in what area of your life you sound just like them.
You're not better than the craziest dumbest worst influence you can point to. You're not even good at hiding it. That's what we're fucking up. You don't have to be Alex Jones-level crazy to live in denial, lie, feel morally and righteously entitled to your small window on the world, or artfully construct narratives of who's to blame. I've seen museum curators on 60-minutes sound like meth addicts. The real drug is the story you're telling about yourself.
My "liberal," "educated," "not crazy" "friends" over the years have proven as lazy, judgmental, disingenuous, full of shit, and unhelpful as any genuine cunt I've ever met. I bet their private self-sacrifices or donations or rainbow flag sticker serves as a healthy pat on the 'ol back about how stalwart they are in their defense of a deliberately vague sense and hope for a brighter future. So much fucking complaining, in the same style over the same shit as we just repeat the same fuck ups that got us here.
It will take commitment, work, accountability, sacrifice, truth, networking, painful bravery, and decades of time in the face of incredible odds to claw back any remote sense of order or safety or sense. You think our zeitgeist of exhaustion, anger, distraction, excuses, ascendant authoritarianism, and reinforced motivated denial are up to the task? "My" people aren't mine, talking in whispers or cliches. My environment is primarily one of isolation, day-by-day, and desperate pleas for genuine engagement. You think I give a fuck about Joe Rogan in any real way?
I care about the "good natured" people in my professional orbits who lie to my face about how happy they are for me or how concerned they are about their clients. I care about the "friends" who bemoan "society" but can't be bothered to preserve or build one that cares to have me in it. I care about opportunities I've pursued or attempted to provide people only for them to have been resented, destroyed, or ignored. I care about how hard it is to find leaders. I care about how daily stories of success or accountability, the only building blocks that will work, get washed away by complacency.
1 in 10. I still maintain that 1 in 10 is the rule you can apply up and down levels of focus or hierarchy as to why anything works or doesn't anywhere. There's 1 person, doing 1 thing right, along 1 domain, and 9 intersecting with their effort to fuck it up. Within that 1 person, they have 1 thing, the story they tell about themselves, they'll overburden to account for the 9 other things they're fucking up.
You might be a people person and a terrible manager, so you and everyone you know will get roped into the story of how nice you are as your 1 not-dipshit employee keeps the business alive.
You might be a smart person with zero insight as to how people speak leading you to be naive and missing a crucial piece of what informs your ability to self-evaluate. The story of your smartness will do the heavy lifting unconcerned with wisdom or unknown unknowns.
You might be a "normal" or "boring" person, self-described. The connotative boost to your held-harmless posture let's you "just" say things as though your words and behavior are devoid of consequences.
Why am I confident I could listen to Joe Rogan for 10,000 hours and never find myself shaking Alex Jones's hand and excited to explore "mere questions" about Sandy Hook, vaccines, or whatever latest conspiracy comes spewing out of their asses? What's my brain doing that yours isn't? What's my brain doing that you don't trust someone else's to do? What's my brain doing that you can't recognize or define for yourself? I'm asking questions of myself. I'm asking questions of you that 9 out of 10 are going to ignore and pretend never got asked.
Why?
You're exhausted. You're angry. You're isolated. You're confused. You're distracted. You're lazy. You're a liar. You're scared. You're cunty and condescending. You're not wise. You're not smart. You're working on the reactionary justification impulse to downplay and dismiss my accusations, if you're reading this at all, before you even get to the end of the paragraph let alone piece.
I'm exhausted. I'm angry. I'm isolated. I'm confused. I'm distracted. I'm lazy. I'm a liar. I'm scared. I'm a cunt and condescending. I'm not smart. I'm not wise. I felt and suppressed a reactionary impulse because I'm both reading and writing as an accountable process of contextualizing and sanding off the sharpest edges of those true statements. It's not "whether" they're true, it's "how" they're true and what your process is to account for them.
When I'm exhausted, I pause. I don't stop entirely. When I'm angry, I say so, then write, then contextualize and search for a better definition of what I think I'm angry at. When I'm isolated, I make plans so I have things to look forward to that put me out in the world. When I'm confused I read more about the topic and ask questions. When I'm lazy, I apologize for not taking the time or putting in the effort. When I lie it's to protect myself from entities or people I don't respect or who maintain power over me. I'm scared that I'm more psychologically motivated by retribution and demonstrating how I'm right than almost anything else. Is being a condescending cunt not self-evident? I'm incidentally informed about a handful of things in any given moment that are constantly evolving. My awareness of that is about the extent of my wisdom.
Whatever peace I might maintain gets threatened by an email, shitty driver, being hungry, or sometimes even the weather. By disposition I'm not less reactionary. I'm no less informed by early trauma. I'm no less piecing together messy and incomplete pieces of a story about myself and alleged desires and perspective on how to achieve them. No matter how much I achieve or how quickly, I'm impatient. I'm demanding. I'm suffering my seemingly unfair and unreasonable expectations constantly. Accepting and building that awareness into how I navigate the world is my salvation. It doesn't take magic. It's just personal responsibility. I think, on the whole, we are practically and "spiritually" devoid of the concept. Whatever amount of it we have, it's in service to the 1 in 10 dimension that makes us feel the best.
As as average non or skim-readers reflexively like to point out to me, I don't "seem" to look, sound, or feel the best. Yeah. Thanks for nothing.
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