I think the most important thing about this era is to understand how the fuck this happened. I have no answers and have never heard anything convincing. I think if humanity lasts long enough, hundreds of years of scholars will be trying to understand it. Most people on earth could’ve predicted most of this shit, yet no amount of spreading that knowledge made a fucking difference. If nothing else, this tells us how unbelievably irrational humans are.
You’re right about all of this. What I can’t fathom though – is that in the past, facts mattered. A lot. How did all of the propaganda literally erase that entirely? That’s what I cannot figure out. It’s not like the internet invented the concept of the lie. Before social media, at least most people would have some skepticism and if nothing else, ask their smart friend. How the hell did that go away?
We are not a logic, rational creature. Our brains are not machines for working out problems, they’re machines for telling stories to create a coherent narrative.
I gotta push back against this. It’s much more complicated than this. Humans have a complex brain, with some parts matching this description perfectly, and others that do not at all. If we were not capable of both being rational and prioritizing facts, we’d probably still be roughly the same as chimpanzees. Instead, we developed incredibly complicated systems for accomplishing long term goals, and throughout human history, cooperation based on rational thought has played a huge role in the direction our species took. Hell, without that ability, there probably wouldn’t have ever been a coherent ruling class. They wouldn’t have been able to put all the pieces in place to hoard wealth indefinitely.
What I see now as a distinct change is that rational thought just literally gets turned off at will, at any moment. In the past, 98% of people would watch a video of a crime and agree at least roughly on what happened. Now people literally seem to deny what their visual cortex perceives in favor of something they heard already. That is new.
I wasn’t very clear about the cooperation part. What I mean wasn’t that you have to be rational to cooperate. What I’m saying is that you have to be rational to plan out things that take dozens or hundreds of years and effectively utilize the cooperation of thousands of individuals who are all looking to solve the same problem.
You are using modern societal issues like inequality as evidence that we aren’t rational, but I dispute that strongly. Those problems used to be much, much worse, literally because the ruling class used a rational but evil plan to take care of themselves. Because of rational working class fighting back in a very organized and rational manner at a few different points in history, we made progress against them. We don’t have a 40 hour work week or OSHA in America because a bunch of emotional and angry public kept trying random things without a thought. We have those things from planning and hard work. Both are examples of being entirely rational.
No, most of them are just racist enough that they genuinely don’t care what else happens so long as non-whites suffer.
Then large swaths of people who chugged the propaganda Kool-aid into thinking any other group of people achieving 1 more right or freedom meant all of theirs were being stripped away.
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I think the most important thing about this era is to understand how the fuck this happened. I have no answers and have never heard anything convincing. I think if humanity lasts long enough, hundreds of years of scholars will be trying to understand it. Most people on earth could’ve predicted most of this shit, yet no amount of spreading that knowledge made a fucking difference. If nothing else, this tells us how unbelievably irrational humans are.
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You’re right about all of this. What I can’t fathom though – is that in the past, facts mattered. A lot. How did all of the propaganda literally erase that entirely? That’s what I cannot figure out. It’s not like the internet invented the concept of the lie. Before social media, at least most people would have some skepticism and if nothing else, ask their smart friend. How the hell did that go away?
deleted by creator
I gotta push back against this. It’s much more complicated than this. Humans have a complex brain, with some parts matching this description perfectly, and others that do not at all. If we were not capable of both being rational and prioritizing facts, we’d probably still be roughly the same as chimpanzees. Instead, we developed incredibly complicated systems for accomplishing long term goals, and throughout human history, cooperation based on rational thought has played a huge role in the direction our species took. Hell, without that ability, there probably wouldn’t have ever been a coherent ruling class. They wouldn’t have been able to put all the pieces in place to hoard wealth indefinitely.
What I see now as a distinct change is that rational thought just literally gets turned off at will, at any moment. In the past, 98% of people would watch a video of a crime and agree at least roughly on what happened. Now people literally seem to deny what their visual cortex perceives in favor of something they heard already. That is new.
deleted by creator
I wasn’t very clear about the cooperation part. What I mean wasn’t that you have to be rational to cooperate. What I’m saying is that you have to be rational to plan out things that take dozens or hundreds of years and effectively utilize the cooperation of thousands of individuals who are all looking to solve the same problem.
You are using modern societal issues like inequality as evidence that we aren’t rational, but I dispute that strongly. Those problems used to be much, much worse, literally because the ruling class used a rational but evil plan to take care of themselves. Because of rational working class fighting back in a very organized and rational manner at a few different points in history, we made progress against them. We don’t have a 40 hour work week or OSHA in America because a bunch of emotional and angry public kept trying random things without a thought. We have those things from planning and hard work. Both are examples of being entirely rational.
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Intentional psyop
No, most of them are just racist enough that they genuinely don’t care what else happens so long as non-whites suffer.
Then large swaths of people who chugged the propaganda Kool-aid into thinking any other group of people achieving 1 more right or freedom meant all of theirs were being stripped away.