The perspective I subscribe to is that access and abundance has outpaced the average persons ability to choose. By which I mean, their talent at choosing. An overall inability to make quality decisions. I would say the issue really grew some teeth in maybe the 50’s and has been accelerating more or less exponentially. The art of exploiting this inability to choose first starts getting real traction in the evolution advertising. Getting people to buy cans of beans and cigarettes was the larval form of a much more sinister science of mass manipulation. The internet definitely threw gasoline on the fire. And now no one knows what is quality, or true, or nutritious, or sustainable, or important. The average person is completely overwhelmed and operating on a low-level fight-or-flight type reasoning. Unfortunately I don’t think there is a short term solution. People need to start learning at a very young age explicitly how to not be a mark. Which is antithetical to the wealthy and politically connected people whose bread and butter is hoards of unscrupulous consumers of products and rhetoric.
this is definitely an interesting explanation, although i don’t know how much difference there is between this and my theory of “people are just less involved in politics, and as a result, engage less critically with it, as they do with everything else in their lives these days”
The average person is completely overwhelmed and operating on a low-level fight-or-flight type reasoning.
i think this is sort of accurate? I think the difference is that people are choosing not to invest their time and energy into these things, before engaging with them, leading to a very low quality of work. I.E. bad elections. Just looking at social media seems to confirm this outright.
The only short term solution is immense pain and suffering, any sufficient amount of distress will motivate something to engage in more aggressive and risky behaviors, which is the only way out of this mess in any short order, though it may not be desirable.
The long term answer is solving the media issue, because that’s a huge problem, solving the social media issue, which is 70% of the issue at this point, and forcing people to engage critically with this kind of stuff.
The hard part is finding out how to do this effectively without negating the very benefits derived from engaging in this kind of social restructuring. It may very well be too late for us to do anything to combat it, we might be at the crab bucket point in mr bones wild ride.
People are willing to do anything except for engaging in thought provoking/critical levels of social engagement, even if makes a fool of themselves. Just look at any social media, any hot button political issue. It’s all just fish in a barrel.
The perspective I subscribe to is that access and abundance has outpaced the average persons ability to choose. By which I mean, their talent at choosing. An overall inability to make quality decisions. I would say the issue really grew some teeth in maybe the 50’s and has been accelerating more or less exponentially. The art of exploiting this inability to choose first starts getting real traction in the evolution advertising. Getting people to buy cans of beans and cigarettes was the larval form of a much more sinister science of mass manipulation. The internet definitely threw gasoline on the fire. And now no one knows what is quality, or true, or nutritious, or sustainable, or important. The average person is completely overwhelmed and operating on a low-level fight-or-flight type reasoning. Unfortunately I don’t think there is a short term solution. People need to start learning at a very young age explicitly how to not be a mark. Which is antithetical to the wealthy and politically connected people whose bread and butter is hoards of unscrupulous consumers of products and rhetoric.
this is definitely an interesting explanation, although i don’t know how much difference there is between this and my theory of “people are just less involved in politics, and as a result, engage less critically with it, as they do with everything else in their lives these days”
i think this is sort of accurate? I think the difference is that people are choosing not to invest their time and energy into these things, before engaging with them, leading to a very low quality of work. I.E. bad elections. Just looking at social media seems to confirm this outright.
The only short term solution is immense pain and suffering, any sufficient amount of distress will motivate something to engage in more aggressive and risky behaviors, which is the only way out of this mess in any short order, though it may not be desirable.
The long term answer is solving the media issue, because that’s a huge problem, solving the social media issue, which is 70% of the issue at this point, and forcing people to engage critically with this kind of stuff.
The hard part is finding out how to do this effectively without negating the very benefits derived from engaging in this kind of social restructuring. It may very well be too late for us to do anything to combat it, we might be at the crab bucket point in mr bones wild ride.
People are willing to do anything except for engaging in thought provoking/critical levels of social engagement, even if makes a fool of themselves. Just look at any social media, any hot button political issue. It’s all just fish in a barrel.