That’s what scares me - not being wrong, but being convinced I’m right for reasons that are more about mood than method.
I think that'll be the case most of the time. The only known way to get a grasp of reality is cooperation, and the agreement to let experiment be the arbiter of truth. Which is difficult, as many systems can't easily be experimented on in isolation (and you're left with counterfactuals only).
Histories greatest thinkers struggled with this too. Descartes changed his famous postulate "je pense donc je suis" to "je doute donc je suis" later in life. ("I think therefore I am", became "I doubt therefore I am"). I read that as trading reason for emotion as core to his being.
In the early 90s something similar happened in Belgium (1).
What lessened the extremism in the following couple of elections was investment (in infrastructure, healthcare, economic opportunities, etc) outside of the cities as well.
It turned out that for every tax frank gathered, 80 cents were spend on prettifying the larger cities and the major port. People were mostly (rightly?) pissed off that government represented a terrible ROI for the same group of people for decades. They would've been better of without a federal government. They saw their lives get worse, whilst at the same time that government applauded themselves for the great things they achieved.
I'm not sure how feasible the same solution is today, as there's very little investment budget anyways. Most of tax revenue goes to pensions and healthcare of a reversed population pyramid.
those thoughts are prevalent enough to cause this problem.
Can take people out of the soviet, but can't take soviet out of the people (1).
Sadly it's a system of thought that isn't concerned with observable reality. It's a sentiment I recognise in most (political) extremists: the idea that your problems must be someone else's fault (the brown, women, billionairs, ... pick your poison).
And, as you noticed, banning it will indeed only validate that sentiment.
(I grew up in DDR, luckily left in early 90s. A solution is therapy, as those people are stuck in generational trauma, which is known to lessen or completely void you of empathy. But that doesn't scale to halve a country).
There's no such thing. A person nor company can unilaterally decide "not to engage with politics", as politics engages with them in thousands of ways. The best they can do is self-censorship, which, even when successfull, is in itself a form of political engagement.
which one is the dictatorship?
False dichotomy 🙄
We need them more than ever now that the US has decided to go full mask off.
Who's "we" in this case? And why would they "need" someone now, because of stuff in the US?
I think that'll be the case most of the time. The only known way to get a grasp of reality is cooperation, and the agreement to let experiment be the arbiter of truth. Which is difficult, as many systems can't easily be experimented on in isolation (and you're left with counterfactuals only).
Histories greatest thinkers struggled with this too. Descartes changed his famous postulate "je pense donc je suis" to "je doute donc je suis" later in life. ("I think therefore I am", became "I doubt therefore I am"). I read that as trading reason for emotion as core to his being.