|
Quidam Viator posted:THE POINT of this article is to look at the VERY LARGE number of Americans who believe every one of these false things religiously, and get to the bottom of HOW they are able to believe them and resist all reasonable efforts to change their mind, and finally turn the tables and accuse YOU of being the rear end in a top hat for thinking differently. The current state of American politics is strongly determined by this very practice! This is going to possibly sound weird (and may very well be wrong), but I'm going to throw out there that if you want people to be more open-minded, they have to be more economically secure. The truth is expensive. The act of searching for the truth is expensive, whether you measure it in the millions of dollars required to properly study even the simplest phenomenon, the mental discipline to painstakingly research your gut feelings about topics that every informed citizen should have an opinion about, or the emotional cost of rejecting the beliefs implanted by the role models of your youth. The closer you are to poverty, the less money/energy/willpower/what-have-you can be risked challenging what is fed to you just by living in the world. Meaning that whatever lands in your brain first and can latch on to an existing bias will probably win the day. First impressions are everything, confirmation bias is everything, and it can cost an order of magnitude more to dislodge a false belief than to implant a true one. I do not think it is a coincidence that our most economically prosperious period also saw us as a nation most willing to challenge bullshit attitudes about race, gender, and sexuality.
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2015 21:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 15:23 |
|
|
Wheeee posted:But right now if I'm working full time for barely above poverty level wages, behind on my bills, with kids to take care of, I don't have the level of personal security required to even begin giving a poo poo about broader issues. Amergin actually contributed something really useful in the USPol thread by throwing out a strawman regarding what being a stereotypical D&D "get off the fence and get involved" reaction would be. It had the usual hyperbole of course, but made the very real point that if the only people who are allowed to change the system are those who can afford to devote their life and career to politics, the only people you are going to get are those who can afford to do so (or those who are so fanatically driven that it's what they want more than a family, kids, or anything else). The democratic assumption is that there are so many of these people that the populace can be forced to pick among them and STILL get good leaders, but I think economic uncertainty makes that less and less likely every day. Let's add one more thing to the list of ways that GMI would make our society better.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2015 21:42
|
|
|
Quidam Viator posted:I could be wrong, but that's the impression I have gotted of the period. It's an overgeneralization, but this isn't a media studies class so let's take it as more-or-less valid just as a thought exercise. Any given person has maybe 6-7 media streams to choose from (a few TV stations, one or two newspapers of record for their town, maybe a talk radaio channel); whoever controls the message on those channels wields enormous power over public opinion, especially if you assume that most people will latch on to the first thing they hear about any given subject. They are quite literally dictators of public opinion, and while they each have their own point of view they are all competing for the same mass of attention and there is a limit to how niche you can go, given how expensive it is to run a TV/newspaper/radio station. Having quality, unbiased news in your media market is essentially random - either you have some rich people willing to foot the bill in the spirit of public service or you don't. It's a great deal of power with no oversight and it can, and was, often abused. This isn't a state of affairs we would ever want to go back to, even if it were possible, which it's not. What we have now is preferable because the same technology that facilitiates the echo chamber effect (which I'm not disputing) also gives anyone with an internet connection the ability to independantly learn and educate themself about any topic in the scope of human knowledge. If Walter Cronkite tells you something about polar ice you probably aren't in a position to validate his claim, unless you happen to have stacks privileges at a major research University. Now you can do it from basically any podunk library in the country, and most likely you can do it from the comfort of your own couch. The catch, to repeat myself, is that no one outside of internet shutins (hello, Something Awful dot com!) has the loving time or energy to independently vet every half-truth and deceit they're exposed to in the world, even only considering just those topics that a civic-minded person should have an opinion on. But at least the internet makes it possible to become informed about those things in a way that 99% of humanity couldn't even twenty years ago, so it wins over the days of a handful of old white men reading the news. It has made us more informed, but we are still not adequately informed. Being open minded is still more expensive than being closed minded.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2015 22:19
|
|