I don’t disagree with anything there. I think there are lots of reasons people end up with that line of thinking. Lots of reasons.
Do you think there really are more doom mongers than historically? Or have the threats just changed?
Discussion
Apocalyptic thinking has always been around. It’s always been a tool to manipulate and control people. There’s also the idealized story of the singular hero who fights the corrupt system institutionalized by his enemies and any reliance on the cohesion of the group is considered “communism” or “socialism.”
It seems to me the crisis of trust in society today, which I anticipate getting worse due to the misinformation amplifying potential of generative AI, is creating increasingly fertile ground for doom-mongering soothsayers to demagogue their way to being seen as credible voices with credible answers.
Agreed. In a world thats is trending towards more isolation, more alienation and apathy, how do we rebuild our systems of trust? Politicians and the media speak to the extremes with little attention to paid to the middle, where most people reside. I’m worried it will take a lot more pain before we are able to rebuild what has been lost.
Yeah. History is not encouraging, here. There seems to be one antidote to declining societal trust: a shared, external threat. Possibly among the most disturbing double-edged elements of human nature. 9/11 was the last time we saw something like that happen. And that social trust was hijacked by neoconservatives to launch the Iraq War and create the forever wars.
I hadn’t thought of that. A rallying cry that society could congeal around. In such a fractured world, with such extreme views and large platforms for those views to spread, it’s scary to think about how big that external threat would have to be.
It's a well-understood phenomenon in sociology around group dynamics, and in political science. It's also well understood by autocrats and demagogues, who weaponize the fear of external threats to distract from their own corruption and tyranny.