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I won't lie, I don't think we'll ever totally agree. I'm getting the gist that we fundamentally have a different understanding of the human race.
You're holding people to your own standards, which is admirable because you clearly have your head on straight. I just view people as generally more base and malleable. Animals that react to the stimulus they're given and environment they're put in.
It's why propaganda can work with simple repetition; it's why ancient cultures and atrocities feel so alien; it's why there's a natural evolutionary drift toward tribalism.
From that: this is a generation being left behind educationally, economically, and socially. They know their quality of life is regressing but don't know why. They're an audience searching for clear answers.
They're also the only humans in history to spend more of their formative adolescence on screen time than on other traditional activities.
So they're starting on the back foot and getting unprecedented exposure to privately operated, centralized media sources. It follows that whoever owns those platforms (or pays enough) can selectively amplify any narrative they want to great effect.
It would have been just as feasible to push their politics to the left as right. If you look at who operates these platforms you'll find, unsurprisingly, its right wing media moguls. The capitalists with the capital and mechanisms to spread their gospel have done so.
So at the end of the day I think it is reasonable to scold a person who you know should have better media literacy. I just don't think it makes any sense to extend that to an entire voting block. Its more productive to direct that effort toward the root of the problem, the people pushing the content.
that's unlikely, and that's fine, i'm mostly just here to share my position.
100%, i have a higher standard for the average general populous, than most people do, but i simply believe that we cannot function as a society if we are below that threshold, and given recent global events, and the trend towards politics becoming worse and worse, i feel highly justified, and think you would be on a long uphill argument against that point.
You're correct about your conception of humans as animal, this is 100% why we act the way that we do, and why we're susceptible to these problems, we've engineered our way out of these problems however, now only to fall into the hole we've just dug with no way out? I don't believe that. I think any single person owes themselves at least some level of autonomy, and critical thinking alongside intelligence, to at the very least break through that problem barrier, otherwise you're at a "eating shit contaminated drinking water and dying from any number of given ailments" level of behaviorism. Other people, and i assume you would argue that we should protect people from doing this to themselves, but i think especially given the recent timeline, that this is simply impossible, you cannot do that, it will never work. Fixing it of course, is a bigger problem. But that's not why im here, i'm here to providing commentary in the hopes that it changes peoples outlook on life, and how they view their position in the world.
you make an interesting point about the generational divide in upbringing, though it's worth noting that, this is not particularly new, since the industrial revolution at least, and it affects more than the young, the primary age group being targetted by the kind of stuff i like to work against, is people in their 50-70 age range, people who have been around for along time, remember "when it was better" and are mentally, not as engaged as they once were, starting to coast into retirement, if not in retirement already.
In fact, if you look at the younger age ranges, it's quite heavily split between the sides, it doesn't seem to be a hugely generational issue until you get older, where it skews conservative, which is an established trend, and a rather obtuse one i would argue.
you're 100% right about the media narrative, and the media environment, however i would like to counter it with two points, for one thing, it only works because people are WILLING to consume it. If people aren't, it will never be successful, this is obviously not the case, as these companies rake in millions of dollars on the regular. And two, i don't think you can simply "regulate" this issue out, humans have an innate tendency toward the unknown, the taboo, and the bizarre, there are probably studies on the effects of restricting access to certain materials and the effects on the consumption of these materials in the general populous. It leads to a sort of self fulfilling prophecy of "the ELITES dont want YOU to see THIS" because they quite literally, do not want you to see it, because it's not productive, but again, people are stupid, and will consume whatever slop they get presented. Evidently, it should follow that if this fact suddenly becomes true, things will only get worse.
You either have to convince the public that this shit is fake and not real, move them to another source of media naturally (literally how?) or simply forcibly remove it, and then i guess crack down on consumption and distribution of that media ad infinitum? There isn't exactly a good solution here, unless you take the most optimal approach of "culling the problematic individuals" which is of course, deeply unpopular, but you may be able to justify it, ethically and morally. That's ultimately what im getting at here. You very quickly begin to approach a sort of event horizon of non truths, and i think we've passed that point, or at least passed the point of no return, and im not sure we're capable of returning. Maybe it is, but i truly do not think we can recover, at least before something drastic happens.
Perhaps we should refer to this as the KTI razor, lmao.