We live in the age of fear because the hose of information that floods us is constantly opened further: Letters → Telegram → Telephone → Radio → TV → Internet → Mobile Internet.
Human beings need time to manage their emotions. Time spent waiting. Time being bored. Time when NO new information, not even positive, is arriving.
We are constantly distracted and thus increasingly unable to sort out our feelings. That is the reason.
And distracted parents that can't give their children at least 15 minutes of absolutely undivided attention per day worsen their offspring's ability to manage emotions even further.
That is why Zuckerberg/Facebook's idea "just flood everyone with everything and it will get better" is dead-wrong.
What Facebook could do to really help the world is turning off it's platform for one day each week.
There is no feasible way for me to agree more with this.
I very much belong to those negatively affected by this phenomenon. I'd wager many a HN commenter is. My RSS feeds are a carefully crafted web of information, as much of a not-echo chamber I can create. From stuff I don't agree with on almost anything - Breitbart and its national counterparts, neocon blogs, libertarian thinktanks - to sources I think of as pretty neutral - like the simple feeds of press conglomerates just feeding headlines - to the stuff I agree with vehemently and thus view as most dubious, I get it all, all day, all the time. Even syndicated across devices. I'm very rarely the one to ask "what are you talking about?" and constantly the one to explain topics. It's okay, being the AP of your social circles isn't the worst role to fill.
But it does something to you, doesn't it? I feel like my view of this world has darkened over the years. I'm only thirty years old now and I feel like we're headed for disaster on a dozen different concurrent tracks. My view of man has become shrouded in a perpetual gloom, my idea of a future a cycnical dystopia.
I know that isn't fair or true, but it's become increasingly hard to think otherwise.
What practical use do you get out of reading "news" such as:
>Breitbart and its national counterparts, neocon blogs, libertarian thinktanks - to sources I think of as pretty neutral - like the simple feeds of press conglomerates just feeding headlines...
If you are feeling such crippling despair from consuming this information, why are you consuming it (Assuming you're not a sadist.)? Especially when you said yourself you know it's not true.
"News" is often like fast food -- it's made as quickly and cheaply as possible, is highly lacking in nutritional value, and is detrimental to health.
If you don't understand the opposing viewpoint, you can't discuss it with those that agree with it. You're reduced to "no, you're wrong", which is the same viewpoint they have.
Sticking to places that are skewed towards a similar bias as yourself doesn't help you understand those that have differing views to you. It can be especially important to be able to do this when those people are in your family, in order to keep your family together, rather than letting those viewpoints tear you apart.
Do you enjoy discussing these things with others? If not, I'd suggest stopping. Any good done is probably a drop lost in a rainstorm, and it's not worth any significant amount of harm to your personal happiness, IMO.
Now, local politics, where you can really make a difference, may be another matter. But again, if you're not enjoying it or making a fairly serious commitment to changing things for the better, you'll likely be happier just ignoring it.
Realizing that following national politics and policy is basically no more valuable to myself or to humanity than keeping up with soap operas was liberating. I'd suggest embracing that view if it's affecting your quality of life. It'll let you dip into it when it's interesting to you, without taking it too seriously or getting stressed out by it. Treat outcomes at anything above the county level like the weather, since it may as well be as far as you're personally concerned, unless you're rich or have the right combo of time+talent+will to make a real difference.
>rather than letting those viewpoints tear you apart.
Is that not what you're already doing?
How can you bring light into your family's life when you're full of darkness?
It's okay to let people be wrong and biased, because haven't we all been?
>Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
Sorry to be pedantic, but I googled the quote because it didn't sound like Lao Tzu to me. It's a nice quote, but it sounds vaguely Buddhist. It looks like it was written in a Taoist book called the Hua Hu Ching several hundred years after Lao Tzu's death, as a Taoist response to Buddhism.
The Huahujing (Hua Hu Ching) is traditionally attributed to Lao Tzu (Laozi), though there is no real use in being pedantic about the identity or timeline of Lao Tzu -- no one knows.
Moreover, English translations of the Tao Te Ching vary immensely and are highly subjective, as ancient Chinese hardly translates onto English. The quote is but one of many different translations.
>If you don't understand the opposing viewpoint, you can't discuss it with those that agree with it. You're reduced to "no, you're wrong", which is the same viewpoint they have.
who cares? what is the purpose of exposing yourself to things that will annoy you that you have no control over, just so you can argue with people?
For many ideas, you can't really understand what your own viewpoint until you see an opposing idea and reject it. And you can't really consider why you believe what you believe until you have to defend it against criticism.
That being said, this kind of argument is only really useful in the right kind of environment, academia for example. Certainly not the vast majority of the Internet. And once you've thought about these things for a bit, there's not much value in continually exposing yourself to a toxic cesspool just to remind yourself that it's not for you.
Your attitude is what leads to echo chambers that cause the arguments to be so awful and polarizing. Your comment would make me laugh if I weren't so sad knowing it's how most people feel.
I'm inclined to agree with sib comment by ashark. While I agree with everything you say here, none of that points to an actual underlying need to engage with opposition politics (except in the case you point to, when it creates familial conflict, which by the way must be the absolute worst, and my sympathies to all those struggling with pro-Trump relatives). Unless you yourself are a politician or political operative, you're not likely to get much satisfaction arguing politics with strangers.
> If you are feeling such crippling despair from consuming this information, why are you consuming it (Assuming you're not a sadist.)?
This! I stopped reading mainstream news years ago and I'm a LOT better off feeling. I'm less stressed, less angry, less fearful. I don't know "that funny/offensive thing that Trump said" and I don't know about the latest celebrity breakups but I can still form opinions about people and politics without sensational bullcrap being shoved down my throat on a daily basis!
> But it does something to you, doesn't it? I feel like my view of this world has darkened over the years. I'm only thirty years old now and I feel like we're headed for disaster on a dozen different concurrent tracks. My view of man has become shrouded in a perpetual gloom, my idea of a future a cycnical dystopia.
Mirror, is that you?
> My RSS feeds are a carefully crafted web of information, as much of a not-echo chamber I can create
Can you share this list? I struggle to find myself content that isn't inside my echo chamber, and would appreciate a bigger selection of sources!
Pew did some research on large news outlets and how much different groups trusted them.
I'd try sampling from their list a mix of ones you agree with and ones you don't. Especially some of the ones not recognized outside of their echo chamber, like Mother Jones, Breitbart, Daily Kos, Drudge Report, Slate, etc.
I really like memeorandum.com for this. Like Techmeme, its sister site, it groups news stories by topic. You can read all sides. It gives you an excellent overview of how easy it is to put bias into what appears to be objective coverage.
I came to the conclusion that the impact I can have on the world is dwarfed by the suffering that keeping up with news causes me; thus, I crafted the opposite type of echo chamber, excluding most news sources. I am much happier now, and can focus on where I feel I can have real positive impact, like our industry.
My RSS feeds are a carefully crafted web of information
Well there's your problem. My suggestion would be to tune out. Get in to some life threatening sport like parachuting or rock climbing or dirt bike riding. We (men especially?) love fear, especially overcoming the real kind. Helps put the pathetic "news" in to perspective, I find anyway. Running and sweating in general help to.
Also, don't worry. Our generation isn't the first to live in fear. Our parents lived through The Cold War, and their parents through the very hot wars of WWI & WWII, and before that no modern medice, and the marauding hordes of barbarians, and so on.
I'd be hard-pressed to find one that didn't live in fear. Perhaps we can except the ( us - I are a late, nearly cusp) Baby Boomers and the only fear then ( nuclear war ) wasn't a fear any more , once you'd read enough game theory.
My folks were silent generation, and images of Detroit and Watts burning, campus unrest and cops bustin' heads at the Chicago convention unnerved them. Not even growing up in WWII prepared them for that.
All news have to emphazise fear. It doesn't really matter what part of the spectrum they are on, what they fear is different, sure, but it is the same emotion. Thus you read only the bad thing in the world, and while it is commendable that you want to see all sides, shouldn't that include the good news too? For example how many of your blogs included the fact that the world reduced the number of people living in poverty, a feat that seemed impossible, 3 years ahead of the deadline? That, based on this, we are actively planing to remove the last half, BEFORE 2030?
Let me guess, nobody? It is arguably one of the top 3 best humanitarian news ever, but almost nobody knows, because it isn't fear and so doesn't sell.
That and also consider getting yourself checked for depression.
> I feel like we're headed for disaster on a dozen different concurrent tracks.
It has become obvious to me that the reason for humankind's problems is the fact that we refuse our spiritual nature (i.e. as in "connecting with the other side during deep meditation"). I believe our future suffering which seems more and more obvious will force us to reconnect with our spiritual nature. And when that finally happens, on a societal level, then our way of "thinking" and acting will profoundly change and we will manage to turn around. But not before, I'm afraid.
Edit: Psychedelic substances allow for short-lived breakthroughs on that level, which is probably one of the reasons they were banned by governments from even being researched. And it's also why they are so important.
Of our material nature. We all have a spiritual nature as well, but mostly don't venture to discover it. It adds a very special dimension to an otherwise life with a "meh" appearance.
Basically, we are not alone. We can connect with our spiritual guides, get help, etc.
Currently offline until the satellite bidirectional dish arrives - yes, that remotely ;) - but once I'm back, I'll gladly share. Gonna comment here again then.
I was genuinely alarmed when it came out that Facebook use averages 50 minutes/day. I have trouble believing that it can possibly be good for the world to have that number rise.
More broadly, the best thing I've done for my focus and mental health is slowing and controlling my information intake. Disabling push notifications, choosing aggregators over direct feeds, and reading international sites for domestic news have all helped reduce and refine my intake. Beyond technical approaches, I've pushed news out of my social media feeds and self-imposed a ban on on-going "personal drama" news stories (Casey Anthony, Oscar Pistorius, etc).
This has been good in itself, and has also come with surprising side benefits. I read more long-form content, not by force of will but because I have less occupying my 'media consumption' time. I also consume more "pre-digested" stories - that can lead to spin issues, but it also cuts down on emotional immediacy. I'd rather go through an interesting historical account of a crime than hear about every stage of the unfolding investigation.
I've come to value "no new inputs" time more than almost all of my active input stretches. I can't overstate the value of that processing time.
Making similar arguments, Tim Ferriss introduced concepts he called the "media fast" and "low information diet" when he published The 4-Hour Workweek back in 2007. The overarching idea was that you should devote some time and energy to actively identifying the least useful information you're consuming, and stop consuming it. IIRC, his taxonomy was that information which requires your action or affects you directly in the near future is useful, everything else is not. So he didn't follow election coverage at all for example.
I still think of this as one of the most useful ideas I've ever come across and have taken it pretty far over the years, for instance disabling all notifications on my phone, culling my Facebook feed very aggressively (and uninstalling their app), and following very few media sources--because most news is non-useful in this sense. It definitely gives me more peace of mind, and when I slip and start reading more crappy useless information I notice myself getting more anxious.
It's also made me feel that the world would be better off without ad-based media as we know it, because the companies which publish it are the ones most responsible for putting out this low information, amygdala-terrorizing crap. If you really need it (and you probably don't), you can get a pretty good, reasonably unbiased feed of what's going on in the world via news wires like Reuters and AP. But we have this giant industry which basically spins and distorts what those organizations produce, slaps ads on it, produces clickbaity headlines and gives it to you for free. It's free because deep down inside, we all know it's not useful. If it was useful we'd pay for it. We're reading it because our lizard brain hungers.
The Digital Sabbath. Also, while we're reinventing ancient traditions for the modern age, how about a Digital Salat - where you unplug and meditate for a few minutes 5 times a day.
My solution is NO active looking for news until Friday, and then only for an hour.
It has greatly increased my overall happiness. And you really start to see news for the attention drug it seems to have become. You also learn what is really important as you'll hear about it. Yes you miss things but honestly, I've found what is missed is really not all that important.
It's easy for a portion of people on HN to minimize their use of Facebook because most visitors to this site hate ads and have a general dislike and distrust towards the service Facebook offers. On the contrary, the general population doesn't have the same perspective on things since they aren't as technical and probably less educated as many HN visitors so they'll continue to use Facebook disregarding the potential consequences that may arise. Also it doesn't help a lot of people are still using Facebook and still remains a great way to keep up with people.
What if what we are seeing is that what used to be mainstream media is now niche media, though it is still distributed through the same channels? What if the fringe is the same, it is just that the mainstream no longer watches tv, or that cord cutters are politically similar in a way that upset the previous equilibrium?
Alternate theory with the same implication: what if television advertising has become so marginal that it no longer supports the serious business framework it once had?
Either way, my theory can be phrased as: What if television has become fringe media?
> What Facebook could do to really help the world is turning off it's platform for one day each week.
This sentiment brings to mind the movement to Design for Time Well Spent[0]. I don't know how the movement is doing. But I like to keep its principles in mind whenever I inflict things upon others.
Yes, this is very spot on. I try to unplug as much as I can every Sunday. Get outdoors, go visit a museum, or spend a chunk of the day read a good book.
I also think unplugging for an entire week or more every year is healthy. Go camping for a week, or go somewhere remote, and get the hell away from the computer and phone.
I don't know why you are downvoted, HN is a big part of my news addiction cycle, but I can't help it.
There is a certain satisfaction in reading news, being in the know about new developments - even if 80% of the time it doesn't help you at all/you'll forget about it the next day.
I'm wasting so much time on news sites and other pages that inform me about new developments, it's quite sad.
Most of the time there isn't even any news to be had - it's just "oh, nothing new here, moving on" in a cycle through different pages - then the thought lingers on that there might be something new by now and I start again from the beginning.
Climate change is a very real threat and it's justifiably scary. Our government, in the last 8 years, used remotely operated drones to carry out extrajudicial killings of American citizens -- including a teenage boy. Our security state now engages in mass surveillance of us in a time when our government is engaging in extraordinary rendition of suspected "terrorists" in secret with limited oversight. Economic inequality is worse than at almost any time in human history, including the gilded age prior to the great depression.
That's not rhetoric, those are simple statements of fact. Those things are scary and fear of them is justified.
We may be -- in this very moment -- at the safest point in human history. But the fear isn't about where we are. It's about where we're headed.
> Climate change ... extrajudicial killings ... those are simple statements of fact. Those things are scary and fear of them is justified.
The funny thing is though, the anxieties that you see on TV are pretty much fear of anything but those things. You will see big-league fear-mongers using "hit them harder" with more extraordinary rendition and "climate change is a con to handicap us" lines of thought.
This. The people talking about fear the most are not talking about any of the things in the grandparent post, and instead are asking to double down on that behavior.
> Our government, in the last 8 years, used remotely operated drones to carry out extrajudicial killings of American citizens -- including a teenage boy.
Not my government, but still I can't help but wonder why it should matter that they are American citizens. A very large multiple of citizens of other countries is murdered in this way and from where I'm sitting I don't see much difference between the two.
One reason it matters is because our Constitution explicitly grants citizens (not foreigners) certain rights. Our government is not allowed to violate those rights and if they do, they can technically be held accountable. The government can do shady things to outsiders within the constraints of the Constitution.
As long as our government is honoring the Constitution, we have some hope of fixing its problems/flaws. If they decide they don't need to honor the Constitution, we have little hope of doing so...
I'm not seeing "citizens" or "non-citizens" in any of these contexts.
What I do see is: "Congress shall make no law", "right of the people", "consent of owner", and likewise.
It's an unpopular view of the Bill of Rights, but shouldn't these rights be extended to everyone, and not merely "citizens"? Cause I'm certainly not seeing that word anywhere in there.
In particular, the Supreme Court of the US gets to vote on what the Constitution means. And that sometimes yields non-intuitive interpretations of the plainly apparent reading of the rights amendments.
For instance, the 4th Amendment would seem to indicate that the US cannot spy on foreigners without a warrant. Only two justices had the stones to confirm that. The majority voted that interpreting the amendment as written would make it too difficult for the US to gather foreign intelligence. They literally voted that extending basic human rights to everyone would be too inconvenient.
It doesn't matter if the original intent was to protect everybody, rather than just citizens, when those tasked with judging cases may be swayed by political expedience.
It is my opinion that reading the US Constitution should be sufficient to understand the entire foundation of US law, rather than also being forced to study several centuries of judicial precedent under Anglo-American Common Law. As an American, I want the US government to get a warrant before conducting a search, on anyone, anywhere. I don't particularly care whether they are citizens, because I don't want the US agent to be an asshole when supposedly representing and defending my interests.
I believe "the people" is interpreted to mean the citizens of the United States. There are a lot of subtleties to the constitution and how our laws work.
"Congress shall make no law" meant the laws that Congress gets to pass, which are laws that apply within the United States. Congress doesn't get to pass laws that apply to foreign countries. ("Laws" here are distinct from "treaties".)
"People" meant citizens, not foreigners, even though I cannot think of any place where that is explicitly stated. It's pretty clearly implied, though, when you say "right of the people". What people does the Constitution give rights to? The people of the US, not the people of any other country.
There's still this thing called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that says "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person". The United States voted for it in 1948.
And does it have any teeth? What happens when governments break it?
At least in the United States there's a clear solution to the American government breaking the constitution, and that's an armed revolt as a last resort and a finally new government (but not necessarily new constitution).
I'm absolutely not suggesting Americans do this. it's a just a consequence outlined both in history and the constitution.
Agreed, but tossaway's point hold some merit. If the people in this country aren't playing by the rules they've agreed to, it's going to be more difficult to get them to agree to new rules.
I agree. In fact I would say these words mean any living person regardless of nationality (though the courts would disagree with me):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government
That's the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.
Some parts of the Constitution apply to non-citizens, some parts don't. For example, the 14th Amendment makes a distinction on this point--note the use of "citizens" vs. "any person":
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The problem is not adherence to some constitution (especially the American constitution which contains quite some arbitrary and outdated things), but basic human rights. A constitution can be a legal framework for basic human rights, but many are pretty bad at that and the US has actively decided to not honor human rights (not accepting rulings of the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, etc.)
What things are outdated? It's a document that outlines the principles of separation of powers and the role of government.
I think it is still very much relevant. Even if it was rewritten how would it be improved? Wouldn't we end up with the same principles just maybe worded differently?
The whole voting system for instance. With telecommunication better systems became feasible, and systems that also guarantee proportional representation like MMP [1] were devised.
There are several references to things that don't really apply anymore today. No matter how you might stand on the issue of the right to bear arms, the reference to militias doesn't really fit into the context of today's times.
People have locks to their house doors but they don't have locks to their minds. Any burglar can come in and plant, not steal ideas, and then people think, hey.. this is my idea, it's in my mind.
Critical thinking, this is the antidote. Protect your mind with critical thinking, and don't let any idea enter unscrutinized. It's better to dismiss it then let it enter unscrutinized. But don't dismiss everything, or you'll develop confirmation bias. Put in the effort to reflect on/research some of them..
Without diving into specifics, I'm usually annoyed by people pitching "we're safer now than ever!" That argument almost always hinges on day-to-day, statistical safety; the most common citations are crime rates and life expectancies. It's a good rejoinder to certain things (like the cable news fixation on kidnappings and murders), but it's a deeply incomplete story.
A lot of the most potent fears are black swan issues - something like bioweapons terrorism obviously isn't going to be reflected in everyday murder rates. Other issues are predictable and measurable, but not yet devastating. Environmental issues - not just warming, but things like drought and antibiotic resistance - are real and obvious problems. The fact that their harms will be suffered in the near future rather than now is no reason to neglect them.
Very simply, the statistical argument for current safety is true but unrelated to a lot of what concerns us.
People pitching "we're safer now than ever" do so to allay cable news and talk radio induced fears of crime rates and immigration.
There's an entirely different discussion to be had about existential threats to humanity, but
1. the majority of the populace is pre-occupied with fighting the cable news fear battle
2. the existential threats from antibiotic resistance, bioweapons and climate change require people to understand large numbers and dispersed threats. Humans tend to be bad at this on average.
A lot of the most popular fears are either unsupported or provably untrue; most of my friends grew up being warned that (effectively nonexistent) childsnatchers and murderers lurked behind every corner. The cable news fixation on lurid crimes by people who don't look like us is absurd and alarming.
I guess I'm reacting more to the neoliberal insistence that things are getting better, and so we should all stay on this trajectory and not raise too many objections. It's a bait-and-switch where you rebut a popular fear ("crime is rising!") and pretend you've proven the broader point that there's nothing serious to fear. This sort of thing: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-guest-edits-wi....
We're deeply wired to not appreciate low probability risk, but I think that there's also a popular technocratic-left narrative that actively minimizes those risks. (I also think that a lot of our ostensibly political gains amount to credit-taking for a handful of good outcomes in environmentalism and technology, but that's another matter.)
What's unique about this time in history is the degree of transparency and information we have available...
> Our government, in the last 8 years, used remotely operated drones to carry out extrajudicial killings of American citizens -- including a teenage boy.
Governments have done all manner of terrible things to their own people and others throughout history. What's new in this era is it's becoming harder and harder to hide such acts.
That means, as a citizenry, we're collectively confronted with topics which, in the past, were kept hidden from us. That in turn means we have more "triggers" of fearful responses, and of course industries are growing to exploit that, but ultimately we're talking about something which is a Good Thing(TM).
It would feel so much nicer if they were hidden. You can't fear something you're unaware of. Even if there's lots of horrible things, any one person being made aware of more than a few is unlikely.
I'm by no means advocating a lack of transparency but ignorance is bliss.
There's plenty of reason for concern, but actual fear doesn't help you make rational decisions. We need a rational response to complex issues, not an emotional one. Fear is a bad advisor.
Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? This is the result of the race to the bottom for eyeballs and attention - the appeal to fear. Does this ever resolve?
We spend so much time lamenting the demise of journalism, the sensationalization of media, the fear-mongering, etc... But it's not like distinct "bad choices" led to this state - it's the simple consequence of TPTB (well, anyone, really) having the ability to engage wider and wider audiences (and ultimately everybody) in increasingly real-time creating such fierce competition for attention that we must eventually use our most powerful emotional appeals for even the most trivial messages.
I mean, look at me, being all fatalistic - I'm guilty too. But I'm legitimately curious where we go from here, or perhaps more accurately, where do people think the bottom really is, and what will happen when we get there?
I'm more than half convinced that the problem is with how these things are monetized. Basically, I think the per-view/per-click model of profit is disastrous.
I value a well-researched, well-analyzed, 3000 word Guardian piece far more than a 200 word CNN piece. But if I click through one of the former and three of the latter, I'm conveying (roughly) three times the value to CNN. And if I click a link, the 'transaction' is made (for CPC, at least); it doesn't matter if I hate the piece and click away.
This has left us in a place where you can either be niche (producing high user value) or manipulative (producing high user volume). Both interfere with detailed, consensus-reality news. Thoughtful, public-interest journalism in the vein of Murrow is the lowest-profit option for embedded advertising.
We've incentivized for a news model which is not just hostile to society, but hostile to users. I don't want my how-to guides to come as slideshows with slow page refreshes between panels, but that's what I get. And I don't want my news to come as hyperbolic fear-mongering with clickbait headlines, but that's also what I get.
So I think we're a little doomed, because humans inherently respond to drama and uncertainty, so we get a race to the bottom. But not truly doomed - I value lots of other things as well, and it's the monetization model that emphasizes our baser instincts. We don't need to nobly abandon market forces, just find a way to monetize that's based on something deeper than "pages loaded".
Have you ever felt this sense of weariness on the internet? The idea that nothing is new, you've seen and heard it all before, and just a state of the brain being fried? This happens with increasing frequency to me, and is part of the reason why I seem to be gravitating, inexorably as it were, towards a low-information diet. No facebook, no instagram/snapchat/social media du jour, minimal news, and certainly no trump fever.
I have a feeling the future will look more like the past than we'd like to believe. That eventually, similar to banner-blindness, we'll develop clickbait-blindness and long form, carefully researched and nuanced pieces will be a prerequisite if one wants attention.
That or /r/forwardsfromgrandma, but I hope it's the former.
I've recently been on my own diet, and I have been experimenting with this method, when picking up the phone, set a timer, say 15 minutes and only allocate that much time to news, HN, social media etc.
This is where magazines and some newspapers were good, journalists collated the interesting stuff for us and gave us a digest to read, which was published at most, once per day.
I think the problem resides in the west's insistence on spreading the ideas of equality. Watching a youtube video from buzzfeed is (in the minds of many) a legitimate way to learn about things like group conflict or any other social phenomenon. Mass communication has indirectly given rise to mass access to bad information. However, that alone would not be a problem. What makes it a problem is once you are told that your opinion is equal to all others in society, you begin to believe that your buzzfeed backed opinion is on par with a nobel prize winning POLS professor.
>Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication? This is the result of the race to the bottom for eyeballs and attention - the appeal to fear. Does this ever resolve?
sure, all you need to fix that is a prescription for the latest anti depressants that the nice pharmaceutical companies have made to help you deal with all the existential angst that our society has been engineered to cause you.
>Is incessant fear-mongering manipulation the inevitable dystopian end of a society that is always connected to channels of mass communication?
No, it's the result of leaving nonfiction communication to the lowest-common-denominator of market forces. Just look at Great Britain: sure, they've got Rupert Murdoch, but they've also got the BBC.
> it's the result of leaving nonfiction communication to the lowest-common-denominator of market forces.
but seriously, what's the alternative? How do you avoid market forces? What process does a culture need to undergo to pull it's journalism away from market forces and enshrine it so that it is no longer a commodity afflicted by the market's weaknesses?
Is the BBC one such isolated place where the culture of the UK that supports it simply expects it to always have a higher standard, market demands be damned? How did it get there? Or more cynically, how much longer can it last?
Just stop watching tv and listening to radio. Cold turkey. I quit on 2011.
We need campaigns like the "quit smoking" or "keep america beautiful" (anti trash): no tv and no radio
I always intended to write a summary on my transition from media junkie to my present state.
I don't need to know about a person I have never met or a place I will never go. BUT with the internet I can (on my terms) find out about said person or said place when I need to.
If something is important, a friend or family member will tell me.
Some irony I think: educatable people spend their working lives building retirement plans and associating with like minded others. Then once they no longer work they are in front of a tv (or worse have the TV on all the time at home) watching less minded and less educated and less sophisicated people.
Watching tv is going back in the progress you made building your life. Why on earth would a college educated person watch talk-tv? Its like undoing your entire education.
As a 23 year old I can only imagine what it was like to live through the cold war with the colossal fear of nuclear annihilation soaking into every activity/decision.
I feel like it must have been so overwhelming yet intangible - in some ways a nuclear holocaust is much less painful than losing a loved one in a car accident or seeing your country splinter into violent factions. A nuclear holocaust is a quick, binary event - either it happens, or it doesn't.
I also can't imagine what the fear of being drafted into a WWII or Vietnam War situation would feel like.
Would love to hear what anyone with experience has to say about those "ages" of fear relative to this new one of mass-media/technology-produced fear.
Over 100 million of us watched The Day After when it aired, a TV movie about nuclear war. So not only was it top of mind, the range of media alternatives was so much smaller.
Interesting...even with a greater existential threat...the lack of available media made it less of a focus? Even if people had wanted to discuss, they wouldn't have had the platform or information available to have a discussion about the threat of nuclear war?
< the lack of available media made it less of a focus?
Yes x10. Atomic war..any subject, really. We didn't know what we didn't have. If it wasnt on the tv or paper it didn't exist.
"Oddballs" talked about DDT, women's rights, ozone layer,
Poverty, gambling, single parenthood- you name the subject.
Letters to editors gave others' voices. But no way to communicate back. Magazines gave voices too, but weekly or monthly.
Aside from civil rights and anti Vietnam war organizing there was not much organizing going on.
I recall a spray painted "go to dc Jan 20" on a pinball joint in my university city hometown.
Printed flyers on poles organized people for war protests.
The first real "always talked about " thing was Watergate hearings and then of course the Iran hostages and Nightline each night. Constant update on the subject.
Talk radio did not exist back then. Am radio djs talked but. Never political
I'm not sure where some of these other responses are coming from, but the cold war was very much front and center for my generation, growing up in the 70's and early 80's. If you want to get a good feel for the grinding fear that the possibility of nuclear war instilled in people, just watch the movie "Testament" or read the book "Alas, Babylon" and you'll get a good idea of what that fear was based upon. As another poster indicated, there was nothing "binary" about nuclear war unless you were lucky and were within the blast radius and it killed you instantly.
> As a 23 year old I can only imagine what it was like to live through the cold war with the colossal fear of nuclear annihilation soaking into every activity/decision.
If they had Facebook back in the days of the cold war, the country would have gone insane with fear in less than 1 year. Social media is an amplifier for base, brutish emotions.
I'm thinking more about MAD - mutually assured destruction of entire nations/much of the world, rather than 1 or 2 "isolated" nuclear attacks. Point taken though.
<I can only imagine what it was like to live through the cold war with the colossal fear of nuclear annihilation
It was NEVER top of mind. Remember, the only news was evening broadcasts for 30 minutes or ap/upi reports in local papers. New York times didn't make it to my state except Sundays. It was NEVER a conversation growing up. Back then to find out if your team won you would have to wait for the paper 2 days later if it was not the local team.
<drafted into a WWII or Vietnam War situation would feel like
We
Wwii everyone enlisted. No question. Different times. Vietnam draft was real anxiety.
Late 70's, 80's, nobody worried much about it except at the fringes in the US. The Nuclear Freeze movement got a lot of attention in Europe, 99 Luftballons got some play in the US, kids danced. But the masses in the US had gotten used to the Detente/SALT Treaty era.
The early boomers were scarred somewhat (and still are) by red menace training. They might take stuff like Red Dawn as a serious drama, while it was a bit more like Rushmore for the rest of us.
Having lived through the Cold War imagine how pissed off I am at the authoritarians and fear mongers pushing an insignificant terrorist threat for power accretion and profit. Cold War information weapons have been turned against the people. Fuck that, and the people who did that.
One of the big drivers of fear in the US is the basic feeling that life is harder than it used to be. The implicit guarantee from society that if you finished school and worked hard you would have a good life is broken. Trump has tapped into this feeling, with unexpected success.
In reality, we have met the enemy, and them is us. The US's major problems are internal, not external. The US's economic problems are mostly because we haven't figured out what to do about automation. What are average people with an average high school education going to do? That's the big problem.
As for threats, terrorism is down in the noise of routine shootings. ISIS can hurt us a little now and then, but no way could they invade the US and take over. Militant Islam will continue to be a headache worldwide, but most of the strongly Islamic states are failed states. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt - all were once strong states able to project power, and now they can't.
Climate change is more of a threat outside the US than to the US directly. The US isn't going to get unlivable temperatures like parts of the Middle East. Rising temperatures mean agriculture moves north, and the US has lots of underutilized north. Most of the US is above the levels affected by sea level rise. (Except Florida. Florida has a big problem. Miami already has to pump out their city regularly.)
Nuclear weapons proliferation is a worry, yet one that doesn't show up much politically. North Korea has nuclear weapons, at least medium-range ballistic missiles, and a dictator with the power to use them. It's getting too easy to make nuclear weapons. After all, the technology is 70 years old now.
China is the next superpower, and nobody knows what they'll do. Probably nothing really foolish. Their leadership is not stupid.
Are we really living in an age of fear, or is that a feeling people in the media get from listening to their own output too much?
In reality, the US media and political system have two sides, both of which are determined to set fixing the broken economic system and racial equality/"social justice" against each other. In reality, the media have responded to demagogues blaming the underlying economic problem on other races by insisting that the problem doesn't exist, that it's just something made up by the white working class to justify their racism. In reality, the US's problems may be internal but that doesn't make it any less fucked.
This story's opening hits too close to home.
I grew up in what was predominantly a minority and gay neighborhood in NY. My mom was moderate-left and a musician who you can easily associate with the things and people you'd associate with NY musicians in the 70s.
Bob Grant, Curtis Sliwa and Rush Limbaugh irrevocably changed my family. My mom is now a religious-conservative, homophobic, racist bigot. She shouts at people for no reason. She's gotten into arguments with family members at family dinners and then called the cops on them to have them removed.
My brother is, thankfully, just conservative. Small miracles.
Also, don't discount the role religion plays on fear (yes I am a Christian.) The popular idea in the church is that we are currently living in the end times and the world will progressively become more sinful/dangerous until the earth is destroyed and recreated by Jesus. This is a relatively new idea since the 19th century, but represents the current theological and emotional state of the church today. Look at Islam and you will see a similar expectation of the apocalypse. I think a lot of fear and paranoia in our culture stems from unhealthy religious belief systems.
Or just US Evangelicalism, perhaps? I've never heard that the traditional European Protestants (Lutheran etc) would be preaching the end of times being here.
I wouldn't consider it the dominant Protestant view at all. Maybe amongst Evangelicals ( a subset of Protestants). Even amongst Evangelicals I doubt such literal Millinialist views as expressed in Left Behind are the overwhelmingly majority.
You would likely be mistaken. An overt goal of pro-Israel fundraising by Evangelical groups is to accelerate population of the Holy Land (Levant) by the Jews in order to fulfill end-of-days prophesy [1].
Does anyone have any information whether this viewpoint was significant in the early U.S. foreign aid support of Israel (1930-1970)? I am uneducated in this segment of U.S. history.
Millennialism has been popular in the U.S. for hundreds of years [1]; for a long time postmillennialism (1000 years of peace will precede the second coming of Christ) was the predominant ideology. Much social change, including the abolition of slavery, was justified by religious groups trying to bring in this 1000 year peace.
I agree with your overall point that a different apocalyptic view is becoming the mainstream in religious circles: that the end-times is imminent. I disagree that the religious systems are the cause; I believe that these viewpoints are becoming more popular as anxiety increases among these groups. Rural (Evangelical) Americans are genuinely experiencing decreased economic opportunity; young Muslims in Europe also experience an inability to be accepted in society and are locked out of the job market far worse than Christian youth.
I don't disagree with your analysis but I thought I should add some more information because I think it's interesting.
I can't think of a church in my area that you would hear a hell-fire sermon in. I was raised in a Vineyard church, which mostly revolves around small groups and community outreach. There's little time to worry about the mark of the beast when you're building fences or working food drives. I go to a smaller Crossroads now where we study Timothy Keller or GK Chesterton. I feel relief when I go, not fear.
If you want a fear based church, there's still some that handle snakes in Kentucky (despite being illegal). But these are closed-set churches, that some poor souls are born into. We don't see growing attendance or large community involvement in these places.
This flood of information, especially negative information, is one reason why I think time meditating is so important. I find that meditation helps me concentrate on what is important and I feel primed to take care of what needs to be done, as far as maintaining personal relationships, what work is most important, looking after spiritual, mental, and physical health, etc.
Turn off the TV and stop binging on the news media.
It feels a little insulting to read that headline after watching the 20/20 report on the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax. For that story they relied on one source and didn't listen to their own fact checkers. In the process they damaged the reputation of a university, seemingly destroyed the career of the dean, and wasted the time of a lot of well-intentioned people. An ounce of scrutiny or patience could have prevented the whole mess.
A key point of the story for me, having seen multiple other instances of people claiming narratives which proved false, is that it is difficult to guard against someone who is committed to telling and promoting untruth. The more so if the person appeals to you as sympathetic or persuasive. This is at the very heart of the con.
It's why being both compassionate to someone who's claiming wrongdoing, and making triply-certain you've dotted all 'i's and crossed all 't's is so crucial.
Hoaxes and (bogus) conspiracy stories, financial and business cons, and political cons work like this. They press all our psychological levers which are geared toward belief, and twist them. Piltdown Man, Crop Circles, Clever Hans (the more so as the perpetrator himself was by all accounts among the deceived), the Chess Turk, and other hoaxes.
I could draw more examples from current headlines, though that might prove more divisive.
people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones
> Rolling Stone did retract the story, and has done some considerble introspection on the topic.
Let's look at that link:
"Erdely and her editors had hoped their investigation would sound an alarm about campus sexual assault and would challenge Virginia and other universities to do better."
They weren't reporting news, they were doing advocacy and fear mongering. Nowhere do they say, this is a bad thing for journalists to do.
"At Columbia, an aggrieved student dragged a mattress around campus to call attention to her account of assault and injustice. The facts in these cases were sometimes disputed, but they had generated a wave of campus activism."
"Sometimes disputed: must be the new word for the accused was innocent[1]. Even their outside report is dishonest about the subject.
Also, the whole section on their asking for comment from the fraternity without providing any information on what the reporter wanted comment about is beyond unkind.
but as to learning from the experience:
"Yet Rolling Stone's senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story's failure does not require them to change their editorial systems."
Nope, since frankly, I wasn't giving them a chance before the incident. They had their heyday, but they are just another outrage press now. Their Boston Bombing cover was reprehensible. Its just another data point of a trend line.
IMO it was responsible of them publish that viewpoint and I respect them for doing so while the rest of the media was busy grabbing pitchforks and pouring gas over crosses. The guy was guilty as all hell but the way it all went down was shady. Getting him sentenced to death would have been a cakewalk if done by the book. Instead it was years of press releases making him look more and more guilty and getting that spun around in the media. Even if the result was the same he didn't get a fair trail because the media had him hanging before the dust settled. At least someone had the balls to play devil's advocate.
I agree. When I read this there was a banner on the side showing selected Trump quotes, and the first story at the bottom was about those scary clowns. I like how they point out politicians and the right wing media will use fear, but conveniently ignore the possibility of left wing media using such tactics, while other articles linked to on the same page use such tactics.
>Bad news gives people a great survivor emotion. There's a great euphoria that pours off the bad news item... This survivor emotion is very necessary for news papers and news reports, also it helps to sell advertising which is all good news and is therefore very threatening. Good news threatens people with change. Bad news merely enables them to enjoy the grief of their neighbours.
> this is a global phenomena and needs to be seen in that perspective
You are correct that it's global, though like many negative-cultural things, America is currently clearly "leading" the way, and the west of the developed world is trailing far behind, though, unfortunately, they are trying to catch up.
I find this sort of answer unsatisfyingly incomplete.
All the examples of people who profit off fear: mass media, lawyers, politicians, and industrial pharmaceuticals have all existed for decades longer than the current age of fear. That makes them insufficient as a cause. There must be something else.
Internet is the great amplifier - if you are interested, you know about many more horrible things going on, unfairness, stupid laws that destroy lives, being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
And that is western world. Look elsewhere, you can find tons of inescapable unfair misery (150 million dalits in india, anyone?).
Add peer pressure, instant seeing of highlights of other's lives which makes some depressed.
The development of behavioural science (i.e. not modelling people as rational beings, but exploiting human psychological biases, see R. Cialdini, D. Ariely, D. Kahneman) is a new phenomenon.
Also is the shift from mass broadcasting to targeted messaging. The degree of information available to exploit you, your weaknesses and biases is a new phenomenon.
The erosion of social loyalties and ties, which can be linked to one century of neoliberal policies, is also a change (although it happened in the past: see the Corruption and decline of Rome: http://www.historytoday.com/stephen-williams/corruption-and-...)
Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist, sociologist, psychologist or any other -ist, so I'm not saying this from a quantitative place. This comes from a place of observation on my part. Take it for what it is.
I think fear is a natural human attribute left over from an earlier time in human existence, I really do.
From a young age, if we're lucky enough to have parents, we flock to them because we perceive that the monster under the bed will get us.
In our teenage years, we fear the next steps of our lives and I'd dare say that even the most introverted kid wants to fit in.
In our twenties, we fear being successful or not.
These are gross oversimplifications, but I think the point is illustrated. I think there are two parts to this fear thing. I think we humans are naturally fearful due to thousands of years of biology, and I think we look to leaders out of fear, there's certainly enough evidence of this if you just look at society as a whole and how we behave. Time and time again, societies throughout history look to leaders to placate our fears. The Stanley Milgram experiments touch on this too.
Now for what I perceive to be the dark part of this whole thing. Our leaders have learned that we can be controlled through fear. I say learned, but I possibly mean that this is biological too. If you look back throughout societies, all great societies either were, or eventually became autocratic. We live for someone else to make the scary monsters go away.
Sadly, I think we need fear. Have a look at the Universe 25 experiments to see what happens when a society has all needs met. Spoiler: It appears to end in death and mentally ill behavior.
> I think fear is a natural human attribute left over from an earlier time in human existence, I really do.
It's not a leftover, it's a survival mechanism. If fear were stripped away from a person or a society, it wouldn't last long. It's easy to think that rational thought would keep people from dancing on the edge of a cliff but rationality can be undermined through persuasion, self-delusion, and lack of conscious attention. The limbic system evolved as a attempt to keep us safe prior to logical thought and it still does the job.
Fair enough, these are good points. I didn't state it but what comes to mind for me is that surviving isn't nearly as hard from a physical perspective (At least not in the U.S.), but I think our fear has been replaced. We no longer need to kill a wildebeest by hand to get its food, but we do have to maintain a job to get food.
I posted a similarly-minded article, also from Rolling Stone, and it got flagged. While Trump was in the article's title, the flagger may not have read it since it was a bigger-picture article about the media and political system as a whole.
What's the line between flaggable and acceptable when it comes to articles such as these?
According to [some survey], Americans are most afraid of corruption of government officials...
This is so rational (obviously corruption is common) and long-term-focused (corruption will eventually destroy the state, but it will take a really long time) that I'm a bit impressed by my fellow citizens...
I suspect that it's the opposite of what you might hope it would be. I suspect that the fear of corruption of government officials is almost entirely based on accusations of corruption from their political opponents, and that those same Americans don't believe that "their" politicians are equally corrupt.
I do think there is actual corruption on all sides, simply because of the fact that money and campaign donations are such huge factors in the political process. I think every American should be horrified by this and should be doing everything they can to take money out of what is effectively our hiring process for high-level government officials.
However, I fear that this is not what [some survey] picked up on. I fear that [some survey] picked up on fans of politician X believing X's accusations of corruption on the part of politician Y were true, while simultaneously not believing allegations of corruption about their own candidate. And vice versa. I fear that all [some survey] picked up on is the sheer toxicity of the process nowadays, and not people who are concerned about the integrity of the political process itself.
There are probably some true believers left, but everyone I've talked to in the last several years sees the corruption that exists on both sides. The surprising thing about the survey for me was that lots of people see that corruption as a major problem.
I have asked no less than 10 people why they listen to talk radio when it is clearly propaganda. The response is strangely always almost verbatim "I like to stay informed". It amazes me that they always say the same thing in response. I have found a similar thing when I mention I have no Facebook account...the response is almost always "I just like to keep in touch with people"...but they never seem to point out these are typically people that they stopped talking to years back for a reason. Has this person called you in the last 10 years? When was the last time you actually saw them in person?
Whenever I get the exact same response from multiple people I start to question the role of social media and "news" in brainwashing of the masses.
I am as anti-Facebook as they come while still using Facebook. I care about people in my past even if I haven't talked to them in ten years. I am curious what they are up to, and it makes me happy to see people from my past living happy lives. Being connected to people is a positive feature in my life, even if it comes at the expense of privacy.
Social media is what you make of it. If the beginning and end of your exposure to current events, politics, and information is Facebook, then yes, there's likely to be some uninformed opinions being created.
When was the last time you just called one of them? Or stopped by for a visit?
I apologize if I upset you by implying mass brainwashing...I just find it odd that many share the same reasoning.
In my personal opinion...social media furthers the disconnect from actual relationships and creates imaginary ones that are based on reading posts and looking at pictures but you never really get to see the real person.
And in my personal opinion, social media allows me to be almost 100% more in touch with my family that lives on the other side of the globe, who I would probably barely think about if it wasn't for Facebook. Personally, I find this a good thing. In the counterfactual world in which FB didn't exist, I would have zero contact with them - now I have some.
I'm not saying I'm right and you're wrong, everyone can make their own choice about what's better for them. I'm just saying:
1. It's a huge leap to go from "many people disagree with me" to "may people are brainwashed". Note that tons of the HN population share your views, but I never said I think you are all brainwashed, and I think it would be pretty silly to say so.
2. Saying that social media furthers the disconnect from actual relationships is a pretty big statement, and without real proof it's mostly anecdotal. Everyone has opinions on what is good or not, worthy or not, moral or not, etc - I really think more people should just trust that others know what they're doing. If people use FB and say why they use FB, it's not a 100% certainty that they're right, but give people the benefit of the doubt regarding their own choices!
3. Most people share the same reasoning on why balls fall to the floor when released from the hand. That's not a weird thing - it's because gravity is real.
Lol...I get everything except the balls thing. But anyways...no problem. Do as you please.
Not saying it is wrong to disagree with me...just saying that there is a common theme in responses...which makes me concerned. I wasn't intending to put down those who use social media. Just stating 2 cases where I see a near verbatim response from multiple people in different locations and times. It brings out my paranoia that their response is "scripted" in some way. Not saying I am correct in any way...just a concern I have.
>I have asked no less than 10 people why they listen to talk radio when it is clearly propaganda. The response is strangely always almost verbatim "I like to stay informed".
I have the same experience when I ask people why they read The New York Times.
Fear, like Sex, is a foundational human motivator that has been shown to persuade people to buy things. I don't believe there is anything new going on now. https://youtu.be/IKqXu-5jw60
There might be some kind of homoeostasis for anxiety. If you're not facing serious threats, anxiety gets amplified, and if you're facing serious threats it gets reduced, so it doesn't vary too much. It would be similar to how some say there is a happiness set-point.
Is this time any different than previous? Well at least the fear of nuclear annihilation is smaller. It's kinda normal for the US to think it's on the brink of a disaster. And it's normal for Europeans to think the US supremacy will end at any moment. And still it doesn't and the US is better off than any time before.
What is different today is the Internet. Before that we had TV and radio, which also magnified fear, but not to the extent as the Internet where you can find the "news source" that best fits your particular fears.
I don't think it makes much, if any difference. The internet can be used to spread misinformation, but it can also be used for fact checking. So the net outcome is not that obvious. I'm curious to see some hard data on this subject.
I'm traveling in West Africa right now, and it's fascinating me how different the reality here on the ground is to what thousands of people tried to warn me off. A huge percentage of people think "Africa" is a war-torn, disease infested hell hole and that I would be murdered on day one.
I have spent a massive amount of time wondering why people have such a distorted view of reality, and are so adamant about it - even though they have zero first, second or even third hand experience.
I honestly believe it's caused by the 24-hour "news" spin-cylce in America.
Those "news" stations discovered long ago they need sensationalist stories to continually hook people in. They need shock value, they need over-the-top. And so it goes that when they report on "Africa" they report about some war. Then a month later it's Ebola on the other side of the continent. Then a month later it's famine in some other distant part of the continent. Never mind that in the mean time hundreds of millions of warm, kind, generous people are happily living their lives, smiling, partying and loving life. The picture mass media paints simply does not include 99.9% of what actually happens here, because it's not sensationalist enough for their ratings. And so the average American sitting at home is told that "Africa" is war/disease/famine, which is only a tiny percentage of the whole picture. The "news" stations are not actually lying, they're just painting a fraction of the overall truth. And it's the fraction that gets them good ratings, not the fraction that everyday people need to know about to be well informed about the world.
Exactly the same thing is true of the reporting of Australia in America. Australia is actually a very stable place, nothing much really happens (no civil war, no prime ministers assassinated, little violence etc.) Of course, the media looks for something sensationalist, and now a massive number of people think Australia is "full of deadly animals waiting to kill you". The first time I saw a report of a shark attack in Australia on TV in America I was gob smacked and thought 50 people must have died by the way they were carrying on for 5 hours. In fact one person had a small bite on their leg that needed a few stitches. Having lived there for 23 years I can tell you the majority of Australians have never even seen a deadly animal, but that doesn't stop the American media painting that false picture and the false story continuing.
In the case of Australia it's mostly funny/harmless, and characters like Steve Irwin even played up to it really successfully. Obviously in the case of Africa it's extremely harmful.
I think it's terrifying when the outlet a society relies upon to receive information about the world is so utterly biased and wrong. When 330 million people don't know the truth, how can they make good decisions?
> Australia is actually a very stable place, nothing much really happens (no civil war, no prime ministers assassinated, little violence etc.) Of course, the media looks for something sensationalist, and now a massive number of people think Australia is "full of deadly animals waiting to kill you".
America is the same. Despite all of the rhetoric about the election, gun violence, and policing the US is largely a safe and stable country. Are there major issues to address? Sure - but every country has those (Europe has seen a similar rise in politicians such as Trump, every OECD country is having similar growing pains related to the changes in employment/housing patterns, and violence related to gangs/drugs is an issue just about everywhere).
The challenge of course is to stay aware of the issues facing the world and society without getting caught up in the fear. Stability doesn't make addressing issues such as police shootings, mass surveillance, or terrorism are any less important.
Whilst I mostly agree, I think the key difference is that the US has a majority control of international media, and whilst they love to hype up domestic concerns for viewer ratings, they're significantly more reckless when talking about "not-America".
The fact that you level Australia and the US has both "safe and stable"; the US is an order of magnitude more troublesome than Aus (As someone who has lived in Australia but currently lives in & loves the US)
I grew up in New Zealand and have visited Australia many times (and still have many friends and family living in Australia). I now live in Minnesota.
Is it really any better there? Australia has it's own history of crime related violence, corrupt police, poor treatment of Aboriginal people, poverty, child abuse, drug crimes, and offshore detention centers. Australia is also another major country that seems to ignore environmental issues. Australia only has 12% of the population that the US has - I suspect that if the population was larger the similarities would be even more apparent.
I love visiting Australia but there are definitely some issues under the surface there.
Yeah actually you make some fairly valid points. In some ways, Trump reminds me a lot of Abbott (who's name escaped me so I googled "stupid australian prime minister" and was rewarded with the first result), and while organized crime in Aus is a lot less controlling, if Australia were US-scale it would be.
My gut feel is still that Australia is more forward thinking; gun control and healthcare aren't an absolute nightmare. Then again Australia won't touch marriage equality because of a strong enough pocket of conservative religious people in smaller towns.
Hello from fellow Kiwi who's lived in straya for a few years (amongst other places) and somehow currently landed in new york :)
Using biology to justify simple laziness, prejudice and bigotry seems contrived and unnecessary to me.
My amygdala, as far as i know, cannot tell whether my fears are real or imagined. Whether the imminent danger will really kill me or whether i will just wake up in a cliched hot sweat.
We are supposed to be reasonable, open minded and balanced people. This is the criteria by which we should analyse the politics of fear. As opposed to looking for some primeval trigger within our supposedly fatalistic brains.
I suspect that this is due to a human psychological flaw based in living in the present.
Consider this: We all think, right now, that this time is the most important time that has ever happened in history. Right?
Consider this also: Everyone has always thought that about their own moment in time. Every time in history has been considered to be the most important moment in time.
Consider this a bit more: Think about yourself in ten years time - you would be thinking your time then as being the most important time. People in the future will think their own time as the most important.
We can either assume two things from this: 1) That time increases the importance, value and crucialness of the present continually from when humans begun until the infinite future. or 2) that we have a flaw in our thinking.
When I've brought this up in this forum, people will defend today. They will say that today really is the most important, and bring up examples from technology etc. They will demonstrate their bias of living in the present day. Think about risk - is today more or less risky in terms of nuclear war than during the Cuban missile crisis? Is today more or less risky for your family in terms of disease and quality of life? We are biased, and it's in our very brains. We want to defend our faulty perceptions of reality, as they are literally our reality. But it's not the truth of the matter, and it's not logical. So I expect you to defend the current day.
The article touched on this - in terms of crime, it's much better than it has been. It's easy to say, but we don't feel or believe this. It must be wrong, right? Perhaps it always has felt wrong.
Another flaw about memory - which is probably related. We don't tend to remember ourselves being as scared or anxious in this kind of daily effect, in the past. Thus the past feels better through our memories.
I've studied the fear of crime. This is perceptions compared with the actual risks and actual levels of crime. One way to ask people about how fearful is to consult their memory - "how many times in the last week, when walking down the high street, did you see something that made you fearful". This is a better question than "do you think the high street is more dangerous these days?".
So, in conclusion - we are biased to our present days. We have trouble comparing what we felt like in the past with the time now. We cannot easily extrapolate how we think and feel about today with the future. We are not really living in the age of fear, we just are currently feeling that we do. Indeed, we always think and feel that we are. We need to recognize our perceptions of reality shape our realities.
Well maybe we should stop backing people into a corner then?
For example, why don't back down on immigration? Instead, it sounds like "we're not listening to your concerns, rightful or not, your opinion won't affect how things are done". Hard to imagine how this treatment won't lead to panic attacks.
Actually, countries definitely become harder and harder on immigration but there's a failure to project these changes to fellow voters.
While reading this article I've got the exact feeling that, to the author, it's much more important to reinforce immigration than care about fellow citizens' feelings.
> Well maybe we should stop backing people into a corner then?
I agree with you thus far...
> For example, why don't back down on immigration?
But why this? I would ask for one thing: Rationality and existence of a connection.
For example, if my country Germany is any guide, the parts of the country with the most fear of immigration are the ones least affected by it! Given that missing connection, how would it solve anything to listen to the demand of people in those regions to limit immigration?
I agree with you - but only if the people demanding something are actually affected by it, both ways (i.e. by the thing itself as well as by what they demand).
In Czech Republic, it's even more pronounced. The government accepted in total about 20 immigrants from Syria so far and if you read comments on the internet, or watch demonstrations, it's like the end of the world is coming.
Also some of the fear might be quite shallow. There was a report of some old lady in the village that accepted some refugees. She was first afraid when asked about newcomers, stating fears that are commonly represented in the media. Then when she was told that they have children, and lack some stuff, she went there and donated some clothes.
Hardliners that join fringe political parties are probably quite different. But also less open to reason. But I suspect that most people's fears can be quite easily ameliorated.
If all refugees behaved like that, with a willingness to integrate and understand our ways, I think there would be much less fear going around.
The people start being afraid when they see that some of the so-called refugees are violent, look down on women / homosexuals / Christians / Jews / etc., try to live by their own law, and so on. In a word, we are tolerant and have to accept their intolerance.
Don't believe me? Just look at the reports of Christian refugees being mobbed by Muslim refugees in asylums in Germany. I don't understand why in such a situation the Christian refugees have no right to be protected, while the Muslims have to be shown "tolerance" for their "religious beliefs".
Or Muslim refugees openly declaring in German newspaper interviews that Hitler was a great man and Jews should be eradicated. Do we really want such people in Western countries?
This is what makes people afraid, not the fact that someone has a different skin colour or a different religion.
Sure there are some lunatic "white supremacists" / bona fide racists, but most people's fears are legitimate and not born out of xenophobia or racism. And this is the obstacle to a reasonable discussion: usually, any such fears are dismissed with the "you're racist" comment. Sorry, I don't think I'm racist just because I don't subscribe to the idea that Jews should be exterminated.
So what now: people are not allowed anymore to be afraid of something they have not experienced themselves? Haven't been hit by a car / experienced a nuclear strike / had cancer, but I am not allowed to fear them on principle?
By the way, the ability to see a potentially dangerous situation happening to someone else and deciding you don't want to be in that situation yourself is a sign of a correctly functioning cognitive system.
There is no "back down" on immigration, because immigration is already pretty heavily restricted. There's no way for bystanders to check someone's immigration status, so when you see someone complaining about "too many immigrants", some of the people they're complaining about are actually nationals who've been around for years. And there's no way of getting rid of them, short of violence.
We've already seen this kind of thing (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-37227313) happening more after Brexit. Listening to people who are dangerously wrong on the facts just encourages other people to agree with them.
Whatever the right word for people who turn on immigrants like that is, it's definitely not scared. They're the ones doing the scaring.
Likewise with refugees: there's not really any policy change we can make to stop refugees coming, other than trying to fix the conflict they're fleeing. They're already fleeing death, you're not going to scare them with paperwork. Are you going to deport them (including women and children) to a warzone?
(It's rather like crime: the amount of crime you and your family have ever experienced is a number that can only go up, whereas the probability of becoming a victim has been generally declining over time. So people think crime is rising when it isn't.)
> And there's no way of getting rid of them, short of violence.
And that's where people become really-really cautious about immigration. You can't really change your mind later - after a few years your undesirable neo-compatriot can't be got rid of. It's irreversible. People fear irreversible decisions and don't trust politicians on those.
So the only shot you have is not letting people in at all. Even if it means turning down honest good people.
If you want to make people more immigration friendly, figure out how to track and deport existing immigrants when things go wrong. Not just tell other people what to think.
Perhaps. If you think of irrational or uninformed fears as memes (in the classic sense, not the "pictures with captions" sense) that propagate through a society, the Internet provides mechanisms for those memes to spread much more quickly, and with far less resistance, than before.
At the same time, these same communications mechanisms allow falsehoods to be debunked much more effectively, assuming that readers would rather believe hard boring truths than comfortable exciting falsehoods. Then again, I've seen enough people (even on HN!) say things like, "I would rather be passionate about a lie than bored by a truth" (paraphrasing) that I wonder if even this is true.
People living in times of peace have a distorted reality field where they believe things are about to get them and the end of times is imminent. When you look at actual data, none of these are true.
As a practical matter, when large parts of the population are heavily motivated by manufactured/social fears (as opposed to practical fears of things like bad weather bringing famine), civil unrest and instability is not far behind.
The United States faces a grave situation in which a significant portion of the electorate may reject the outcome next month if it does not go their way, and the side that is more likely to lose is also the side that is most heavily armed because it is most fearful. Scared people with significant access to weapons is a recipe for disaster, as we already see in the context of many individual situations.
This might seem an overly pessimistic view of the US election context, which after all has often evoked bitter rivalries many times in the past only for them to evaporate by election day. I think this time is significantly different not only for historical reasons that need not be rehearsed here, but because this time the Us is in line with a global trend of rejecting democratic institutions and market solutions in favor of ideology and force - hence the rise of so many far-right parties and strongmen everywhere from Europe to the Philippines.
Most people don't have the intelligence or education to fully comprehend the complexity of a global marketplace and the regulatory and technological structures that underpin it. Further, most people don't have the resources or patience to wait for long-promised economic benefits to reach them in a time of deep economic uncertainty. The last 25 years have been a fantastic time to make money - if you're inclined or drawn towards certain styles of entrepeneurship. If you're not a business person and just want to make a living and raise a family, and you didn't happen to pick a career in the right sector of the right growth industry, they've been pretty shitty; a lot of people have seen their household incomes fall in real terms, and the ones without the know-how to see the reasons for such economic changes are pretty angry.
Most people just want to go to work, get paid, and raise a family with a similar or slightly better standard of living than they experienced as children. They're not interested in becoming too knowledgeable in economics, political theory, law, technology and so on. Their parents didn't bother with much of that and they did fine, because the developed world saw huge economic growth during the cold war and earlier generations experienced at great standard of living at a reasonable cost, in many cases leaving much of the bill for future generations. This seemed rational at a time when unlimited economic growth seemed inevitable and there was no real awareness of global environmental impacts. Automation was supposed to allow us all to work a bit less and enjoy more and more leisure, etc. etc. The fact that many of these expectations have turned out to be ill-founded may be the result of conspiracy, or of simple naive optimism, or some combination of the two. It doesn't matter.
What does matter is that the socio-economic-political consensus of 'western civilization' has broken down and we are now facing the possibility of massive structural instability and existential risk. To put it bluntly, I would say there's a 50% possibility of global scale war within the next 5 years. The best outcome I foresee is limited civil unrest followed by a second cold war.
Long-time readers may recall that I'm not big on hyperbole.
Strong AI on the horizon, about the same horizon as quantum computing and pervasive robotics; the new triad. Nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the world several times over. Biological weapons that can be created and deployed by organizations much, much smaller than traditional state actors. Social media educating us that systemic racism has been causing systemic killings of certain parts of our population. Whistle blowers educating us that privacy is all but dead. Trump is on the ballot. Yeah, there is reason to be afraid.
Human beings need time to manage their emotions. Time spent waiting. Time being bored. Time when NO new information, not even positive, is arriving.
We are constantly distracted and thus increasingly unable to sort out our feelings. That is the reason.
And distracted parents that can't give their children at least 15 minutes of absolutely undivided attention per day worsen their offspring's ability to manage emotions even further.
That is why Zuckerberg/Facebook's idea "just flood everyone with everything and it will get better" is dead-wrong.
What Facebook could do to really help the world is turning off it's platform for one day each week.