Comment on YSK that everything the New York Times about Donald Trump actually happened
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoYou’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?
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I struggled with this also around the pandemic watching people deny reality, and my result is that in my adult life I have been re-black-pilled by depressing new knowledge about the human species:
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. And that narrative doesn’t need to follow rules of reality, it just needs to tie ends together. This is why you ruminate and get depressed about things that aren’t real or have already happened, this is why people will cheer for their wrestlers while also knowing it’s scripted, this is why people can get into positions at the height of power by just saying “I’m the best at this.”
We are massively vulnerable to cognitive dissonance, and once again, the only thing that has kept this in check for the majority of human society has been social pressure to know the rules.
The rules have changed over the centuries, but they’ve at least required the members of the community to know how to distinguish things that are against the rules from things that are allowed, and with this comes critical thought (for self preservation) and pondering one’s choices (for self preservation) and the desire to conform and adapt to the will of the people around you (for self preservation.)
When you take away the community and the pressure for survival, people can just live with whatever stories run wild in their minds, without consequence. The rest of us just hit the “mute” button or walk away and go be alone in our own universe of our own choosing. We’re all guilty of doing this about something, at some point, and when you get millions of people doing this at all once, you no longer have “objective reality” you have millions of Main Characters not caring about consequences for choosing to believe in things that run against reality.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’ll concede that my explanation is very simplified, but the nuance has more to do with how the brain pulls together its story-telling material, which is predominantly from associations and experiences and practiced knowledge/actively reinforced education.
But for the vast majority of people who feel things, the brain just hastily assembles an explanation for those feelings on the fly, from materials “laying around” and that path of least resistance is usually whatever is on the surface of an issue or feeling, and that can be a defaulting to a supplied narrative “You’re poor and can’t succeed because immigrants ate your cat.” or it can be tied to your past “You’re suffering because girls are bad, per that one girl who was mean to you in 5th grade.”
And while there is complexity to it, we’re talking about population groups more than individual capacity to be rational.
My turn to push back. I am talking from experience talking to psychologists and reading about brains so it’s only partially out of my ass, but I don’t think cooperation is at ALL required to be based on rational thought, in fact most of our cooperation is based on survival impulses and hardwired defenses, which is why so much cooperative action is based around violence and fear through history. The fact that we can cooperate at all to build bridges and Arby’s restaurants and fiber-optic networks has far more to do with the vision of a small group with more advanced conceptualization using primitive tools to move large numbers of people. (Primitive tool: We pay you to build fiber-optics so that you can eat and not die.) But the thousands of people involved in the project aren’t emotionally tied to the feeling of completion when the last line is laid.
And for the most part, most of our successes and modern world has been built on more of a process of gradual trial and error than a logical plan being seen through from start to finish, of the unsuccessful cooperative actions getting left behind and the successful ones shaping the world. And we define success as that which gives us a more comfortable life with less suffering… so that alone should tell us how flawed this process can be. We are broadly using this overpowered skill of cooperative action for self-preservation, not community preservation, and logic rarely needs to apply.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Quadhammer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Intentional psyop