Every week or so brings another well thought out, evidence-based article somewhere about how Trump’s base is reacting to his latest stunt. This is immediately followed on social media by someone’s comment to the effect, “I know these guys; they’re not like that at all.” These observations come from the right or the left, makes no difference. My reaction is, “Really?”

Let’s see, most polls give Trump’s approval rating consistently around 35%, give or take a point or two (of which much is made, but that’s another story.) The adult population of the country is about 246 million, and this is presumably the target group of the polls. So the articles in question are making statements concerning the beliefs of approximately 86 million people, based on scientific polling. Now, you can have legitimate concerns about the validity of these polls, either on scientific grounds or past performance.

But the person who writes in a FB comment or a tweet that he or she “knows these people” is talking about an infinitessimal sample. A human being can have direct, personal knowledge of maybe 100 people, max. This has been demonstrated by several studies, but even if it’s off by an order of magnitude, it’s no serious competition for professional polling, especially since “all the people I know” is hardly a random sample.

This is just a symptom of a larger issue: we are giving each other far more information about our personal lives, our beliefs (and ipso facto our prejudices) than we can possibly process in a useful way. Add to that the fact that we have access, updated hourly, to information about hundreds or thousands of instances of tragedy and injustice anywhere in the world, and that makes it — I’ll say it — impossible to evaluate most of what gets fed into our heads each day.

I am interested in significant events in my friends’ lives, I really am, but do I need to know about every hangnail, every maddening computer glitch? As far as the news of the world is concerned, am I really ready to vet every allegation of misconduct? More than likely, the former will generate a snicker, and the latter will be incorporated into my world view to the extent it confirms what I already think. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, isn’t it? If the piece doesn’t fit, out it goes. Except we can subtlely change the pieces of reality we don’t like to make them fit.

The virtue of physical newspapers was that they were limited to roughly the amount of information we could deal with. Biased? Of course, but I’ll bet we’re more neurotic now, torn by the possibility of mistaken outrage, or an injustice we can’t possibly set right.

Our knowledge of our friends’ foibles was limited by however much time we could allot to hanging out in cafes and bars, which usually entailed fewer than 5 or 6 people at a time. There were no headlines about minor domestic glitches published for all the world to see and comment upon.

Technology is racing ahead of cultural adaptation. We still give up our secrets as if we were just talking over the fence with a neighbor. And then we express outrage at our lack of privacy.