I agree it's not getting better. We disagree on how confidently we can apportion blame.
My question remains: what is the culture we're aiming for? 🤷🏻♂️
Yep.
Basically. I mean, people have choices. I also think it's pretty strange that when people say "mainstream media", they tend to exclude things like Fox News, even though it is quite literally the most watched news network in the US.
I have a far more cynical view of these things than most other people. I think humans are looking for dopamine hits and to confirm their biases. And there's a lot of people selling that as a product.
My point, exactly. Advertising dollars! 📈
The problem with the concept of authenticity is it has to be authentic in relation to something.
For instance, if you are to insist that someone who prioritizes their physical appearance is an inauthentic individual, as many do, you're implicitly saying that an interest in such aesthetic preferences are inherently wrong at some level.
Someone might counter that the motivations behind such preferences are salient. For instance, you might argue that the reasons someone might spend time on their physical appearance is for some kind of social end you disagree with. Perhaps you argue that social relationships should be built upon deep intellectual connection. But then what about people who build it upon shared interest in sports, or video games, or bitcoin? Are those things "shallow" foundations for relationships too, on their own?
It turns out whenever you talk about authenticity of people, there's some kind of preference you're projecting. You're assuming you're the objective one.
To the extent someone might be saying these other people are not authentic humans, and that they're not being their "true" selves, I think people are being misanthropic in a sense.
How do you explain 2016, then?
Reality is authenticity is mostly an illusion. Most conceptions of it, border on being misanthropic, because it is usually a projection of a subjective preference.
To wit, if CNN had a true left-wing agenda, it wouldn't be giving Trump the platform they are. They're doing it because it raises rating and brings in advertising dollars. They're selling a product. That product is continuous moral outrage. Which is also what Fox News is selling. I think this is a problem with human nature more than anything. Which I get is very cynical. But I think it's unfortunately true.
It's pretty clear to me that the press is pretty motivated by consumer preferences. I think people over-estimate how much nefarious agendas are at play, under-estimate how much commercial media are essentially just echo chambers for hire. Cable news in particular.
*polity not policy. Damned autocorrect.
Does such a thing exist?
I'm not defending the mainstream media. I think news-as-entertainment is pretty deleterious to a healthy policy, for a bunch of reasons. But I'm also not sure the relationship is one-directional. I think people are getting what they want in large part, which makes it hard to disentangle things.
What are we changing the culture to?
To be honest, I think defining freedom to mean “free from state coercion” is a pretty impoverished definition of freedom. I’m a classical liberal, so I’m pretty skeptical of state coercion by default. But I think to the extent that libertarians and anarchists mostly use “freedom” in a way that is defined purely in relation to the state, they’re being sort of silly.
The vast majority of human beings clearly have no interest in taking direct responsibly for their own personal safety, and it’s not clear the world would be a better place if they did so. There’s every reason to believe this would be a substantially more violent world, with significantly more poverty, and generally lower standards of living. I know AnCaps argue vociferously the exact opposite is true, but I think they skipped over a whole bunch of important insights from history.
Not to mention, if this was the kind of freedom that most people were seeking, it’s hard to explain why people aren’t venturing into the wilderness towards a survivalist self-sufficient lifestyle. Funnily enough, most of the people who *do* do that tend to be libertarians and anarchists to begin with. They mistakenly believe others would follow if they just knew the truth about money, the state and Austrian Economics or something like that. But they’re mostly deluding themselves on this.
Some people have this weird notion that if you’re not fully self-sufficient in every way, that you’re living far from some authentic freedom. It seems this stems from certain kinds of temperaments, in a small minority of people. The vast majority of people have far more social temperaments, and simply do not and will not prioritize self-sufficiency in the way that a lot of people in these conversations trick themselves into believing is inevitable, because of bitcoin.
Isn't safety also a form of freedom, though? Ignoring this seems like a good way to create popular support for authoritarianism.
I honestly don't have a clue what the world will be like in five years, and neither do you.
This is wisdom. However, nobody ever thinks it applies to themselves. It only applies to everyone else, in people's minds.