>lack of education and aggressive state-actor PsyOps... Very succinctly put, but it deserves adding something else: the horribleness of the human spirit. Centr

>lack of education and aggressive state-actor PsyOps... Very succinctly put, but it deserves adding something else: the horribleness of the human spirit. Centralized information control by a meritocracy that mostly got it right (modulo all the bigotry) characterizes the mid-twentieth century West, and this idealized, sanitized view of ourselves was optimistic in the extreme. Indeed, I think we can characterize that controlled optimism as morphing from future-tech-worship (50's) to self-worship as the boomers subsumed the hippy ideals along with the apparently easy money they earned in the wealthiest society Earth has ever known. Now instead of morphing into something else, it is the central control that is changing, and we are seeing why, despite its very real flaws, the benevolent dictatorship of even flawed institutions is preferable to the cynical, hateful chaos that reigns when individuals get a chance to shout their bile to the world. I'm not entirely sure all is lost, however. Perhaps we can have our cake (absolute freedom of speech) and eat it too (some sort of moral standard) by introducing social norms no-one has even thought of yet. For example, I would personally love it if cancel culture would turn its gaze not to sexual harrassers, but to the more obvious problem of baseless accusers: those who make accusations without any proof, not even bad proof. Such people should be shunned by society, and not listened to ever again, for they have squandered their right to speak. Within academia, something similar might work when a researcher publishes deeply flawed research, they should be expelled from academia. If the academy doesn't maintain a high standard, then the entire thing could come crashing down (and that's already happening in slow motion). If a whole field refuses to do this (psychology, social sciences) then those entire fields should be dropped, lest they damage the reputation of the other fields of the academy. This sounds harsh, but I think its fair, and it lets us have nice things a little bit longer.