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i was thinking recently about how divided so many countries seem and was thinking about how maybe in the 60s life was simpler and people just believed everything and everyone thought their country was the 'good guy'
then i remembered all the various civil wars and thought, maybe we were always divided along political / religious lines in most countries and social media just makes it seem worse now
what do you guys think ?
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Compared even to recent history, and without exaggeration, we have been living in the most peaceful times at world wide level in recorded history. The only major event to disrupt that tendency was the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The thing is that we have also been able to have increasingly more access to information, so existing conflicts are more public, giving the impression that things are more violent than they used to be.
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i've read Gladwell and while i agree to a large extent, the middle east is still fucked, we have the ukraine - russia thing, isis, hezbo, taliban, NK, china and taiwan ready to pop off. lifespan is actually regressing (for Western pops)
but, what I'm getting at though is maybe there was always a base level of discord in the world that perhaps we didn't notice so much, but it feels magnified because of social media,
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Exactly
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It was easier to build a narrative in the 60s. We know, in hindsight, it was mostly a false one. Nobody had any easy way of verifying that, though, so it seemed more unified.
The Kennedy's started showing where the breaks in various labor movements and parties where in the Unions that got pissed about their justice reforms. Politics was more about financial work and security and wealth, not so much about justice. It culminated of course, in the assassination of Kennedy and then kept on rolling through other Kennedys.
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ignorance is bliss in this sense , then you hear about all the heinous shit and deals the gov were doing, like Iran contra (and a million other things )
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I think you are right, it was simpler but they still divided us. Now they have many, many more tools and avenues to reach us and divide us further. It definitely feels like we are more divided. Like you say maybe way back people just accepted what they were told. But now, there are so many distractions and pysops people seemed to think less critically. So many avenues/outlets telling people what and how to think. It's like we've outsourced our thought process and can't be bothered thinking for ourselves anymore.
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The internet should make it easier to break down narratives and misinformation, but there's a bit of a "deconstruction effect" imo... Now there's an infinite amount of misinformation, and it gives people a reason to distrust everything that doesn't fit into their worldview.
There's always been division and misinformation, the internet is exacerbating it at this point in history.
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i think people , myself included, tend to stick to their own echo chambers also. like I'm sure if there was a stacker news for eth maxis they;d be shitting all over us and not listening to any points we make and vica versa
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True. But they don't have eth.news so we're better 😜
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Social media does bring info to everyone almost instantly but it can divide us as well
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