(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 posteres, Classic-Xer being the most recent and continuous. Have we changed any minds -- especially his? I say no, and the opposite 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.
The people most fully deluded (like Classic X'er) and the people who are right and have a high level of evidence for their positions (I hope that I am one of them, at least as facts will show) may be similarly convinced. I see plenty of promotion of faith as a virtue. Faith has value only as fortitude in the defense of truth. Faith in an illusion brings harm. Con artists (and demagogues like Donald Trump are precisely that in politics) and propagandists try to inculcate faith in something that should be suspect.
When the world crashes around Classic X'er he will feel burned as few people can be. I may be naïve in my optimism about the goodness of Humanity in general (well, so was Anne Frank), but I well know one cost of being a pessimist: as a pessimist one usually ends up having one's pessimism confirmed, and not to good results.
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.