>People are hurting, and they don't have strong communities to support them. Instead, folks who are hurting are huddling together online and perpetuating ill-adaptations
This kind of blase generalization is rather silly but all too common. It also presupposes that some general fix, preferably delivered by someone "who knows better" is in order. People in general are many different things at different times, each with their own variable causes and fixes that are mostly contextual in specific ways.
There's no shortage of community today, both of the literal physical kind and more recently even in a digital version, and if people are "hurting" for lack of community, then they're doing so no more than they would have in the past when establishing contact with others for friendship, shared ideas and love was much more labour intensive.
Also, if you think ill-adaptations, ignorant beliefs and paranoias are common today, you should take a closer look at most of history, in which entrenched interests of all kinds promoted all sorts of false beliefs, xenophobias, paranoias, nationalistic shit and other grossly dishonest beliefs across the board. They were pervasive, harder by far than today to counteract and much more widely entrenched. Large swathes of the population held these beliefs with terrible outcomes in many cases and if anything, it's something that's now decreasing like never before despite all the politically-biased screeching about fake news and "misinformation", often used as a justification for exactly the kind of limited, controlled and more centralized information distribution that used to REALLY promote enforced community and lies for the sake of political interests.
Even well-recognized psychological models have shown that people are smarter than ever, in general and in many specific ways. The Flynn effect has been well documented and though it has a number of likely causes, one of them is surely access to a far broader plurality of information and cultural exposure, with both the bad and the good (however you want to define those).
Moreover, at least now, whenever some idiotically wrong, self-serving or viciously dishonest belief gets promoted by certain groups, counter-groups can form to discredit it and allow for some genuine diversity of ideas, though many call this by another grossly simplistic but insult term, "polarization", which apparently should be eliminated so we can all believe supposedly correct things (though as defined by some specific self-interested agenda or another).
No thanks, I prefer a world in which someone who generalizes that people are hurting can't easily force them to connect, read, view and think in specific ways as decided by someone else until that authority smugly decides they're no longer hurting.
This kind of blase generalization is rather silly but all too common. It also presupposes that some general fix, preferably delivered by someone "who knows better" is in order. People in general are many different things at different times, each with their own variable causes and fixes that are mostly contextual in specific ways.
There's no shortage of community today, both of the literal physical kind and more recently even in a digital version, and if people are "hurting" for lack of community, then they're doing so no more than they would have in the past when establishing contact with others for friendship, shared ideas and love was much more labour intensive.
Also, if you think ill-adaptations, ignorant beliefs and paranoias are common today, you should take a closer look at most of history, in which entrenched interests of all kinds promoted all sorts of false beliefs, xenophobias, paranoias, nationalistic shit and other grossly dishonest beliefs across the board. They were pervasive, harder by far than today to counteract and much more widely entrenched. Large swathes of the population held these beliefs with terrible outcomes in many cases and if anything, it's something that's now decreasing like never before despite all the politically-biased screeching about fake news and "misinformation", often used as a justification for exactly the kind of limited, controlled and more centralized information distribution that used to REALLY promote enforced community and lies for the sake of political interests.
Even well-recognized psychological models have shown that people are smarter than ever, in general and in many specific ways. The Flynn effect has been well documented and though it has a number of likely causes, one of them is surely access to a far broader plurality of information and cultural exposure, with both the bad and the good (however you want to define those).
Moreover, at least now, whenever some idiotically wrong, self-serving or viciously dishonest belief gets promoted by certain groups, counter-groups can form to discredit it and allow for some genuine diversity of ideas, though many call this by another grossly simplistic but insult term, "polarization", which apparently should be eliminated so we can all believe supposedly correct things (though as defined by some specific self-interested agenda or another).
No thanks, I prefer a world in which someone who generalizes that people are hurting can't easily force them to connect, read, view and think in specific ways as decided by someone else until that authority smugly decides they're no longer hurting.