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How could it be healthy to not even agree on the most basic facts of history like whether hundreds of years actually happened or the shape of the earth?
by MBCook 2mo ago
How could it be healthy to not even agree on the most basic facts of history like whether hundreds of years actually happened or the shape of the earth?
- macintux 2mo agoThat’s why I’ve lost much of my optimism regarding U.S. politics. It’s fine, and healthy, to disagree on how best to deal with the world as it exists, but if we can’t agree on reality itself, compromise and progress are so much more challenging.
- edgyquant 2mo agoDoes this stuff really matter when you get down to it? How much does it being true or false change the average persons daily life?
- j4yav 2mo agoEventually the misinformed mob gets together and elects an RFK jr type.
- libertine 2mo agoOh boy... I think you will find the answer in George Orwell's Animal Farm. But to help you understand, rewriting the past to sustain power is the type of thing that degenerates into genocide for example. In the short term it might look innocuous, but if corrupting truth and suspend basic moral and ethic values on something as basic as History, what other basic human values are you willing to suspend because you don't like how something feels? This is the breeding ground for racial supremacists, ethnophobia, etc. Terrible stuff. And you don't need to go into the past to see the consequences, Ukraine is fighting for their existence because a group of people in Russia don't want to acknowledge that a ethnic group they deem inferior can have better chances at thriving than them, to the point of denying Ukrainians existence all together.
- doginasuit 2mo agoI don't think these particular fringe beliefs are directly useful, and they have a real cost in terms of confusion. I also don't expect them to last since they are easy to disprove. But they belong to a bigger trend which questions the value of experts and institutional knowledge. This could either send us into a dark age, or challenge a better class of experts and institutional knowledge. My money is on the latter. Few things improve without some kind of challenge.