> All the last decade has shown me is that democracy is far more fragile than any of us really realized. Populations are frighteningly easy to mislead and misinform en mass
This is absolutely the wrong lesson to take away from the events of the last decade. The whole point of democracy is that we don’t have a priestly class that gets to impose their views by fiat, like the Brahmins of ancient India.
I’m not saying what we have isn’t an improvement on that. But it’s also maybe uncomfortably closer to that than we’re willing to admit to ourselves. And it is terrifyingly fragile.
Spread the right kind of vibes and misinformation and you can get enough of the population to believe anything. Hell, upset enough people and they’ll start to do it themselves.
We’ve already seen several countries essentially vote themselves into dictatorships based on misinformation. This may have been a near miss.
This is absolutely the wrong lesson to take away from the events of the last decade. The whole point of democracy is that we don’t have a priestly class that gets to impose their views by fiat, like the Brahmins of ancient India.