This is why I chcukle to myself when people stress the relevance that something is a fact. You can do a whooooole lot of stuff with facts if you know what you're doing.
The sad truth is it doesn't matter how true or fabricated whatever it is people believe, as long as it keeps them coordinated and united as a nation... Or else the other nations that really like your stuff and land might make their people all believe the same thing and they can gain advantage over time.
No one likes hearing this cute little opinion I have but I think the greatest enemy the USA has today is not the right wing nut jobs nor the left wing jobs, it's division itself.
Believe it or not, american citizens today are experimenting two things history is very familiar with:
religious wars
and
slave revolts.
Sorry, sorry, I mean:
fundamentally incompatible world views about what people should aspire to be, what they should aspire to become as a collective identity and how to get there
and
society's most vulnerable people engaging in violence against the armed forces who follow the orders of those who have societal power...
Cause those are totally different.
Either way, when things get this polarized, fights get ugly. Pushing and shoving cannot be unpushed or unshoved... trust and good faith are lost, and they don't fix themselves.
Only thing that can possibly unite the US with the current level of polarization is nothing short of an atrocity within borders.
Sorry if it's insensitive to talk about these kinds of opinions out loud. just sharing my honest perspective.
Yeah, I'm aware. It's like that in most of the americas, possibly excuding uruguay, surinam and canada. Even in countries with great education, 50% will be below average by definition, leaving lots of room for the sneaky people, and we are living in post truth.
Even when what gets reported is verifiable, the tools of manipulation and manufacture of consent that are available nowadays are unprecedented.
With social media we invented the most state of the art, effective brainwashing machines to date and quickly started using them to start wars (of course).
Both empathy and the lack of it are required. Humans are pack hunters. We work best as teams. Someone has to lead those teams. Guess what traits tend to make for people better at securing and conserving power within groups, and keeping loyalty within their ranks? Yep, you guessed it! Psychopaths! :D
There are benevolent leaders, yes, that exists, but in a competition where anything goes, a psychopath which is difficult ton detect will have the advantage over someone with more empathy and robust moral limits.
There's a reason why they're roughly estimated to be around 10% of the population. Hierarchies need few leaders. The higher the ladder, the more vicious the psycho it gets, because they'll have to be competent enough to defend themselves from the other psychos that want all their tasty tasty power.
The reason why all our leaders are psychopaths is this is the same reason why basketball players are all tall. If you don't have that trait, you just don't get the fucking job (edit: unless you're like REALLY good at it despite your disadvantage).
This used to depress me, but I chose to stop thinking about it. I don't think there's any fixing it.
Err... I'm not trolling or taking any sides here but couldn't that also be claimed about communism? And the vast majority of monarchies if you start your analysis then... And I guess if we look at the current day, one could argue contemporary democracy tends to devolve into fascism...
But, you know, It's almost like the systems in use are irrelevant when there are generalized hostile war scenarios with huge foreign threats that might exterminate your nation state or make it implode through sabotage... And this seems to happen roughly every hundred years or so.
And after the horrors of war, the general population unifies to pick up what's left and swear they will never let anything like this happen again. But then they have kids and grandkids that are like "oh, gramps you so silly".
A basic notion of history and some critical thought shows us this has happened time and time again, the only significant contemporary difference being the existence of aerial and nuclear warfare.
Empires have life cycles, and they get old. Then they get corrupt and other empires start challenging them... And then you have a big big war, and then someone wins, and then people calm down for roughly 50 years... and on and on it goes.
Gracias y buen consejo. Creo que mañana voy a hacer día sin pantallas.