If they can get you to believe that all the news is propaganda, then all of a sudden propaganda from foreign-controlled state media or sourceless loony toon rants from domestic kooks, are all on an equal playing field with real investigative journalism. If everything is fake, your news consumption is just a dietary choice.
Okay, but who are "they"? Who is behind this phenomenon? Who benefits? Why is it happening now and not some other time?
I think it's a bottom-up movement. Humans aren't the only animal that makes mental maps, but we might be the only animal that sometimes makes our maps backward from what we want to believe instead of forward from evidence. If squirrels remember their nuts being buried in more convenient locations, they starve and die. And in the long term, humans and human cultures that veer off from reality are corrected or eliminated.
Where we've gone wrong is not having enough short-term correction. Look at all the lies that people continue to believe, and what they have in common is that wrong beliefs have no clear consequences. This is partly because the modern world is so complex that causes and effects are hard to trace. And it's partly because ordinary people have no fine-scale political power, so believing lies doesn't lead to bad stuff happening, until the public capacity for believing lies gets so big that it can be exploited by cynical leaders, and then a bunch of bad stuff happens at once.
Everyone wants to make the world better, and everyone wants simple inspiring stories, but there is no overlap between those two things. Donald Trump and Derrick Jensen are doing the same thing, serving as the focus and central myth maker for a bunch of people who are looking for that overlap.
I've also been emailing with Anne about how I envy the 1960's, and I always hoped I'd get to live through something similar when the cycle came around again, but instead here I am with a grey beard and it's like the right wing mirror image of the sixties. Here's how I explained it the other day:
What excites me about that time is the mass breaking of barriers in a cultural climate of friendly universalism. Now we've got a breaking of barriers with a climate of hostile tribalism. But if these are the anti-60's, then maybe I can look forward to the anti-80's.
If Trump repeals expanded Medicaid, I just might be homeless in the anti-80's, which would still be better than working at Walmart. But I want to say a little more about tribalism. I define it as finding meaning in belonging to a group which finds meaning in opposition to other groups, and I'm against it. I think it's an obsolete holdover from our prehuman primate ancestors. But it remains part of our nature, and the best we can do is channel it into friendly sports rivalries.
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