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It's odd how easily people will believe that nefarious social developments like conspiracy or genocide occurred decades or centuries ago, after documentary and

It's odd how easily people will believe that nefarious social developments like conspiracy or genocide occurred decades or centuries ago, after documentary and other evidence emerges, but will dissociate themselves from the possibility any such thing could be occurring in the here and now, particularly perpetuated by their own countrymen. You even see this in the outrage over naming buildings and statues: Confederate generals are being excised and even George Washington may be taken off some school marquees, but no one even notices that one of our major airports is named after the Dulles brothers, possibly the two biggest U.S. villains of the postwar era.

pbak 5y ago
I had a discussion on another social platform, in which we came to an hypothesis for that phenomenon : We now have two or three generations of very educated urban denizens which have lived in relatively efficient but very wealthy social machines - modern western-model cities. These machines were made to make their life safe and easy. A necessary side effect, needed to remove social friction, is the progressive removing of personal responsibility. After all, modern institutions are really able to get "into" and meddle with the private/family sphere, for better or worse. In addition to that, the hard-knocks/social struggle/unionized western left of yore figuratively "nannied" or "helicopter parented" their children way past reason - often 10 years or more after biological adolescence ends. As a consequence, we live with gigantic proportion of 20-45 year olds which "fail to adult". They are used to devolve a lot of responsibility to state institution which they need to implicitly trust. They fail to mentally separate social rules from their actual applications. They also fail to mentally separate both from the actual people enforcing said rules. To them, rules equals institutions and automatic respect thereof. Large scale TV, Media and internet operations are such institutions for them. These beliefs "in the system", really, acts as a psychological pacifier : "everything is alright, somebody is in charge". If they released their own grip on that beliefs, the cognitive dissonance, and terror, would be too big. No need for a totalitarian "patriarchal" violent and overbearing state to impose such mental constructions.Turns out that a totalitarian suffocating "matriarchal" nanny state works much better. In an ironic almost twist of fate, they also give the same trust, deference and belief to private organizations and institutions, such as corporations. That phenomenon is actually almost fascist (old style) in nature, which is very frightening to me.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  I don't know, the vast majority of 46+ year olds I know hardly exhibit any more skepticism of official narratives than GenX/millennials/GenZ. I just think that going along with the program was a fruitful course of action for so long that it became very ingrained habit. The ones who had their brains broken by the 60s assassinations missed out on all the Beatles/Woodstock/counterculture fun, and then it certainly didn't do them any good to get pissed about the CIA trafficking drugs into the country in the 80s. I think the (middle class) people in the imperial core have been sheltered from the depredations for so long they're just convinced "it won't happen to me."

pbak 5y ago

I had a discussion on another social platform, in which we came to an hypothesis for that phenomenon : We now have two or three generations of very educated urban denizens which have lived in relatively efficient but very wealthy social machines - modern western-model cities. These machines were made to make their life safe and easy. A necessary side effect, needed to remove social friction, is the progressive removing of personal responsibility. After all, modern institutions are really able to get "into" and meddle with the private/family sphere, for better or worse. In addition to that, the hard-knocks/social struggle/unionized western left of yore figuratively "nannied" or "helicopter parented" their children way past reason - often 10 years or more after biological adolescence ends. As a consequence, we live with gigantic proportion of 20-45 year olds which "fail to adult". They are used to devolve a lot of responsibility to state institution which they need to implicitly trust. They fail to mentally separate social rules from their actual applications. They also fail to mentally separate both from the actual people enforcing said rules. To them, rules equals institutions and automatic respect thereof. Large scale TV, Media and internet operations are such institutions for them. These beliefs "in the system", really, acts as a psychological pacifier : "everything is alright, somebody is in charge". If they released their own grip on that beliefs, the cognitive dissonance, and terror, would be too big. No need for a totalitarian "patriarchal" violent and overbearing state to impose such mental constructions.Turns out that a totalitarian suffocating "matriarchal" nanny state works much better. In an ironic almost twist of fate, they also give the same trust, deference and belief to private organizations and institutions, such as corporations. That phenomenon is actually almost fascist (old style) in nature, which is very frightening to me.

AndrewBissell 5y ago
I don't know, the vast majority of 46+ year olds I know hardly exhibit any more skepticism of official narratives than GenX/millennials/GenZ. I just think that going along with the program was a fruitful course of action for so long that it became very ingrained habit. The ones who had their brains broken by the 60s assassinations missed out on all the Beatles/Woodstock/counterculture fun, and then it certainly didn't do them any good to get pissed about the CIA trafficking drugs into the country in the 80s. I think the (middle class) people in the imperial core have been sheltered from the depredations for so long they're just convinced "it won't happen to me."