B+W thinking in society

I’ve noticed more and more people tend to be polarized to one extreme or the other. Not so much people I interact with in real life but you see it more on social media accounts particularly those that are commenting on news media pages.

The two sides are being driven further and further apart and blind to the many solutions that could bridge gaps. In my view politics is just the new religious fanaticism, just take the same type of people move them from on belief system to the next I can’t see any difference between it.

Is this a sign of the declining mental health of modern society (more narcissistic) or is it manipulation to sway the masses, divide and conquer. Incite fear and anger against the “bad guys” to motivate you to vote a certain way. Are we seeing gaslighting on a scale never seen before?

Totally agreed. I could have written it.

I think it's more to do with how we now gather information.

It used to be an effort to "know" something; you used to have to go to a library etc to find an answer and, as such, you learned the answer along with context.

Now, you can "know" anything in the time it takes to find your phone, but you don't learn the context behind the answer, just the binary answer to a question.

Mark Twain said that people know the price of everything but the value of nothing, and that now applies to knowledge.

We learn a fact and that's the end of the journey; there's no recognised need to see the background to put the answer into perspective and apply it to other situations. So, people find an answer, usually the one they like, and stick to it.

Quoth, a past member who is dearly missed, introduced me indirectly to this concept of emotional reasoning, which I didnt know before and which explained quite a lot of things to me. This "ability" of the common folk to be manipulated by people seems to depend to a high degree on their inability to step back from their emotional perception and see it as merely that. On top of that is a very problematic ingrained disability in people to question and to be rational. They did a few tests here a while ago with students, and teachers, to find out if they can fact-check and how they deal with news stories. One of the most memorable was showing them a picture of a mutated flower (something like this) and saying these flowers were found near Chernobyl. In utter disbelief I had to witness that every single one of the probands thought the flowers had turned this way due to radiation.
Another aspect became rather clear due to aunt Corona in the past months. There have been quite a lot of people here who have gone insane by being told to stay home for a few weeks or by being unable to go to the gym for that amount of time - including the cream of the crap who beliefed children were held in underground bases by satanists to extract some drug from them and to veil that ongoing war under the earth the corona crisis was invented...
While I could probably explain this in a lot of psychological terms, on the top-level I find its quite astoundign how entitled people have become, how unable to just bear with things for a while and how egocentric and emotion-driven they are.
So yea, "narcissism", in the sense of some weird, unfounded egocentricity might be a thing, but frankly msot people are really just plain dumb and are very easily fooled. Im not actually sure if this has become worse, or if the contrast is just bigger nowadays, I'm pretty sure a few hundred years ago it was just like that, just on a smaller scale. It might also be a factor though that people nowadays who are already incapable of rational thought, are just overwhelmed by the complexity of everything on top of that and so become additionally unstable, both cognitively and psychologically? Ultimately of course being overwhelmed might then again trigger additional reactions like regressions, or using more primitive defenses like splitting.

propagandists need anchors to manipulate and mold with. 9/11 is an anchor (the pentagon could have never gotten its invasion of iraq without 9/11), george floyd's death is an anchor. narcs are supposed to be low in empathy...so i wouldn't expect them to care.

Akuma wrote:...

I agree that it's probably fear that makes people follow their emotions; the number of conflicting "facts" that pebble-dash the internet leave most people confused; it's certainly harder to find an unbiased view, especially when most news organisations have an agenda.

Fear causes anger, which is seen in all living creatures, and people rarely focus that anger against the actual cause.

Donald Trump stating that too many people have C-19 because too many are being tested; you'd think this would get nothing but angry laughter, but there are millions who prefer to follow the emotional euphoria than to face common sense.

Jonna wrote:propagandists need anchors to manipulate and mold with. 9/11 is an anchor (the pentagon could have never gotten its invasion of iraq without 9/11), george floyd's death is an anchor. narcs are supposed to be low in empathy...so i wouldn't expect them to care.

True. Karl Marx described religion as being the "opium of the people," but I don't think it's specifically religion. It's anything that provides this anchor, where people can abdicate personal responsibility of thought to an idea. If you get a bunch of people agreeing with you, that's all that most people want.

A focus, a distraction, some notion that they're doing "something" rather than nothing.

How many people would drive a longer route than sit in traffic, just because you prefer the idea of moving rather than being stuck in a tailback, even though you know the detour will take longer? I know I do this.

People react rather than respond and confuse action with solution.

Jonna wrote:propagandists need anchors to manipulate and mold with. 9/11 is an anchor (the pentagon could have never gotten its invasion of iraq without 9/11), george floyd's death is an anchor. narcs are supposed to be low in empathy...so i wouldn't expect them to care.

Agreed, the media is constantly looking for events that fit a certain narrative and sooner or later there will be one and they pounce all over it like disgusting hungry tics.

I’d say that narcs thinking they care more than anyone else is more common than what we think. A good example is your common virtue signaling “Karen” she champions every social justice cause known to man annoyingly so and will attack anyone who has a different view point but at the same time wouldn’t really lift a finger to actually do anything, unless of course they bring their phone with a fresh battery and take plenty of video and selfies to later post on instagram and Facebook. They care about how this makes them look not the actual causes themselves. They can’t make the distinction in their minds

Esmoke wrote: They can’t make the distinction in their minds

I was having a conversation recently with a friend's wife, a typical Karen, who constantly posts emotional self-congratulatory nonsense on social media. I pointed out how people who do this should be peeled, covered in jam and strapped to a wasp's nest. She agreed.

Recently, there was a discussion on here about how people can believe utter nonsense. This may provide the key.

Twitter is all about throwing zingers at people who aren't in full agreement with you, farming those likes and retweets for validation and an ego boost. They want to be part of the wolf pack, makes them feel special and powerful. They're McCarthyists, smelling wrongthink everywhere. Doesn't even matter if they have to lie and ignore inconvenient truths to destroy their prey; if you're a shade of grey they'll just paint you black no matter what.

People think that morality and ethics are instruments of love and empathy, but they are actually the opposite.
The reign of what we call “evilness” begins where we aren't able to love anymore, where we stop empathizing and understanding one's motivations.
Morality was created to justify that we can't love everything, and to confine things that overstep our capacity for love in a delimited area, the area of disidentification, whose things “do not belong me”.
I am aware that I am not very different, I am not able to love everything, and I feel the need to protect myself through judgment, but at least I understand that morality is opposed to love.