12-08-2021, 01:01 PM
(12-08-2021, 12:36 PM)David Horn Wrote:(12-07-2021, 05:28 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(12-07-2021, 12:47 PM)David Horn Wrote: After 50 years of ever greater libertarian thinking, here we are: individuals without strong bonds to anyone outside our immediate orbit. When there is no sense of community, there can be no sense of social responsibiility. Without social responsibilty, social entropy is virtually guarnteed. I don't see that changing easily.
Right, and I don't know how we deal with an echo chamber at its root, as opposed to waving facts in it. I'm not sure what anyone recommends as a mean of breaking through echo chambers, other that people from outside it trying to penetrate it, and thereby make a chamber more open like this one is to all views. And I don't know that this works either. Can "trust" be rebuilt within a society of echo chambers? That would be nice, if it were possible.
That's why I tend to think the only way out is to fight it out. Hopefully through elections, since politics is war made more civilized. But that has been the history of 4Ts.
We've had our share of alternative posters, Classic-Xer being the most recent and continuous. Have we changed any minds -- especially his? I say no, and the opoosite is equally true: we haven't wavered either. The old argument that strongly held views only change under duress seems to hold. I'm not sure what that duress may be in the future, but apparently, we're not there yet.
Military or diplomatic calamity? An economic meltdown of the severity and duration of 1929-1932? One of the worst plagues in human history seems to be confirming biases instead of shattering them.
The concept of "every man for himself" practically ensures that practically everyone gets burned in a zero-sum game.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.