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One of the biggest issues we seem to be facing socially right now is pessimistic victim complexes, especially among young people but it's popping up everywhere. The obsession with being the underdog narrative has grown to massive proportions, whether it be young people adopting oppression olympics identities or the insane comments I saw just a few day ago comparing being a modern man in Europe as tantamount to slavery. Everybody needs to be a victim now in at least some way.
I do think part of it is exposure to more information and negativity focused algorithms. It's hard to feel all the wins when everything in your feed is just people complaining about the compromises they've had to mistake. It's like what Scott Alexander had talked about before with showing the same film to Israel/Palestine supoorters and them both coming thinking it was biased against them. People see the stuff that agrees with them as the neutral baseline and the stuff they don't agree with as an anomaly so something that might be "70% agree, 30% disagree" gets treated as "70% normal and smart, 30% abnormal and dumb". So even just more fair information looks like biased against you information.
But it's not just algorithms and information, they would not work if people did not bite. It's because they want to be angry. Someone naive might think "good news, data centers don't use much water!" or "good news, vaccines don't cause autism and there isn't an autism epidemic, it's just diagnostic drift" or "good news, cops don't really kill that many minorities" or "good news, schools are not giving litter boxes and trans surgeries to cat identified kids" would be received with a smile, but instead it's pushed away with anger. Weirdly enough, "the world is better than you thought" is seen as a bad thing to learn! They want to be a victim of a bad society.
Because for some groups it gets rewarded with status, attention, accommodations and money. So of course people seek those things.
And the loss of stoicism (which of course is 'toxic masculinity') causes people to be less respected for accepting that bad things happened to them, without demanding compensation in some way. So people no longer get pushed away from a victim mentality by shaming, and get pulled towards it with rewards.
Yet both the capriciousness and unfairness of who gets rewarded and how much, logically results in everyone feeling hard done by, even those groups with great victim privileges. Because there is always a group who (temporarily) gets more status, attention, accommodations and money.
Have you considered that many people may simply feel extremely dissatisfied with modern society, but have not been handed a narrative that correctly explains why they feel this way, so they latch on to whatever narrative floats around.
However, then those feelings are still real and they do matter. You cannot reason away feelings. If things in society create an increase in bad feelings, then this is an issue, even/especially if we don't know where these feelings come from.
Funnily, all of your examples are not cases where things are actually getting better over time, but your 'good news' is merely that things are getting worse, but not as much as some people are claiming. We have more data centers, which is a reflecting of the online world taking over, with many major downsides (including that the online world itself is enshittifying), but it takes a bit less resources than some thought. Yay? Autism is on the rise, but we have no clue why or how to fix it. We just know that we can't address the issue by going after vaccines. Yay? Migration issues are making people unhappy all over the world, but the minorities don't get shot by the police all that often compared to how often they kill each other. Yay? There is a huge rise in trans identification, including for young kids, who get experimented on medically, but things have not deteriorated so far that furries get medicalized. Yay?
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You nailed one of my least favourite trends in the Israel/Palestine discourse. I've personally flirted with the Zionist conspiracy bandwagon myself but even in my Joo-poasting arc, I could not read any article from "Jewish" mainstream media and come off thinking the IDF are the good guys. The examples they usually cite of this supposed pro-Israeli bias are occasional word choice hedges (“clashes,” “alleged strikes,” contextualising rocket fire as “response to…”) or instructing reporters to avoid terms like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. But to me, that feels less like propaganda and more like the cautious house style of an establishment outlet that doesn't swallow the full activist catechism. The tone is still predominantly grim Palestinian suffering, orphaned children, power imbalance and skepticism of Israeli explanations for strikes. So is the real charge that these papers are not maximally pro-Palestine and anti-Israel enough? On the other side of the spectrum, pro-Israelis believe that progressive media is inherently biased against "apartheid" Israel and won't take everything their government says at face value, while purchasing the "Hamas narrative" with far less scrutiny.
Tbf a good part of the this cause is also just illiteracy. People can read in the sense of "X does Y" but actually understanding anything beyond that can be difficult for many. Consider the reaction to the Economist's obituary for the Ayatollah.. Just a whole lot of idiots who if not explicitly told "The Ayatollah is bad, the Ayatollah is bad" over and over again are unable to comprehend that you're actually criticizing him because they're too stupid to look past the most literal of readings.
So with the "Jewish media" if you don't explicitly say "Israel bad is evil kill millions of children" then you're basically pro Israel to many of the complainers.
Yeah I don't miss leaving X at all. That title comes across as a withering backhanded slap at a tyrant's delusions of divine grandeur, I literally can't read any adulation there. Hot takes and one-note emotionally charged short-form communication have killed people's reading comprehension like tiktok has killed the youth's attention spans. This is why I abandoned my own joo-poasting, took me too long to realise I was insulting my own intelligence.
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The thing is that journalists and others in the media either know that illiteracy of this type is incredibly common among the audience of their articles and even moreso among the audience of their headlines, or they have the intelligence and knowledge required to know. So when there's significant misunderstanding by the audience of stuff like this, it speaks to either malice, malicious ignorance, or incompetence that's advanced enough to be indistinguishable from malice.
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People are largely victims of 20th century empires. I have almost nothing in common with most of my countrymen, they control me, and I am simply a victim of it. I could have something in common with a 5% or 10% segment, and we could build a society with an actually consensual social contract together, for us. I think this argument even applies to a lot of normies, and they're picking up on it. Broadly, liberals in the United States really are victimized by Republicans, and conservatives are victimized by Democrats. The cattle are off the plantation; personalized media is waking the masses up to the idea of personalized government. Anything short of personalized government is constant extraction and domination for the sake of the Other. That's a fact.
So you know how even two loving people in a relationship still have to compromise over things sometimes despite only being two people who are self selected for similar tastes?
That's going to happen with your fantasy society too, you're going to have disagreements with others and you're going to have compromise with them on things. You're still going to feel like you "lose" on most topics because you're going to be one voice out of, let's say roughly 36 million people if we go off your 10%. Sure it won't be to the same degree, but if you have the mindset of viewing compromising on stuff as a loss then you're not going to be winning anytime soon.
And you'll be in many real ways weaker for it. You'll have a poorer economy less able to achieve any particular goals you want. You'll have a much weaker military. You'll be easy pickings by the ~330 million people who are still part of the greater compromise that is American society. The reason why couples live together is because they find the benefits to be worth compromising on curtain colors or furniture arrangements or noise levels or cleanliness or whatever else. The reason why societies mostly stick together is the same whether it be within the same country or economic unions like the EU or alliances, it's because the benefits of having more than just yourself are great and worth varying amounts of compromise.
Either-or fallacy. If you marry the wrong person, you are miserable. The best thing they can do is split apart or else one person will be motivated to domineer because their differences are too deep. So, 20th century empires are essentially poorly selected, abusive marriages. That doesn't mean there isn't a better spouse possible.
No, because they are defined as agreeing with me on the important topics.
No it wouldn't. Open free trade economy, super intelligent population will mean possibility for elite weapons program and great economy. The whole point is merely to throw off the yoke of proletariat moral laws. Essentially it would be a libertarian polis for high IQ people. Dumb people can come and work, which they will want to do because there will be lots of money, but they will get no say in the politics because they won't ever earn citizenship. When you give them a say, they subjugate better people , which is what is happening in the 20th century empires.
No it's mostly race, language, and domination.
There are many ways around this. The United States could break down and split up. The polity could be far away from the United States. The polity could have a charter with the United States. The polity could have a deal with a serious competitor like China. If the polity were hyper-militaristic, it could rival the size of the United States military with 10% of the base population. Have you heard of Israel by the way? It's like Israel.
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Bruh I had to quit Facebook over this. Not posting culture war content. No, the things that drove others most berserk was arguing things were, actually, good and getting better and not bad
Yeah media is definitely a big part of it, American media dominates the world. We're the fun little soap opera Housewives of the US for them to all laugh about. You can find maga hats and confederate flags and (BLM protests and whatever else all across the world. Not often but more than you'd think, and it's because our whole country is blasted on loudspeakers and things spread everywhere.
I'm worried if we actually did move to Europe I would still continue hearing about America and being troubled by it. But also be troubled by problems in Europe I would also start Noticing.
If you are following the right-wing noise machine in America, you are learning about twice as many problems in Europe as could be Noticed by being there. We have problems, but the American right has an incentive to exaggerate them. It is exactly analogous to Guardian readers in the UK learning about problems in the US that they would struggle to Notice if they spend time there.
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Arguments are soldiers. More specifically, in this case, the mistake is assuming that, say, "datacenters use too much water/we should waste less water" is the reflection of a terminal value. "Datacenters bad" is much closer to terminal, whatever it is; the role of the water narrative is more akin to "finally I have found a good story to convince the sheeple to join the fight against datacenters".
If you take it away, this does not, in their eyes, make datacenters any better, but just makes it harder for them to get agreement and sympathy. So it is with everything else; telling any doomer that their legible indicators of doom are a lie is just telling them to shut up and endure their feeling that everything is rotten alone. (Crime statistics tend to do similar things for right-wingers.)
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Uh this just opens up a cascade of other issues. Like it's good that the 'classical autism' numbers are remaining consistent but significant diagnostic drift around mental illness is going to have other major issues especially in a robust welfare state.
That there is actual issues in the world to discuss doesn't make the main complaint people keep saying over and over again any less nonsense and anger motivated. Someone like RFK has all the resources he could possibly need to understand that the "autism epidemic" isn't actually meaningfully a thing, and yet instead of focusing his efforts on what you said, issues related to diagnostic drift, he wastes all the effort and energy instead. Because admitting that the autism epidemic isn't real topples the other parts of the jenga tower he's built his beliefs on (like if autism epidemic isn't real, then vaccines or preservatives or whatever else couldn't be causing it) so he has to clutch onto nonsense and waste time and money that could be actually doing something useful.
And even when things aren't directly connected, it's not like people go "X isn't true? That's good to hear, but I'm still worried about Y". Like if you think data centers are using too much water and too much electricity and are only good for slop then you can accept the good news on water but still be worried about the grid and slop content. Instead, most people just get pissed that you're pointing out X isn't true.
You're completely missing the point with this. Yes, autism as defined by the previous school of thought is maintaining relatively consistent numbers generationally. However, scope creep of the diagnosis combined with the weaponization of 'I have a disability give me free shit' from people tapped into the system inevitably gets downright rapacious when people who were considered able to have full healthy lives (albeit a bit weird) a generation ago now have a label which entitles them to access whatever societal privileges. I agree that the vaccination = autism correlation/argument is spurious and created by a series of underlying mostly-uncorrelated correlations. RFK's identifying something salient in that the modern system of privilege creates massive overdiagnosis of psychological conditions, even if he doesn't understand or wish to communicate that fact since he'd likely get sledgehammered from anothe direction.
The Data center point is a complete non-sequitur in this case and isn't really reasoned from any place other than 'I don't like data centers and I broadly like the environment, this is a good cudgel'. The same goes for discussing the Trans violence rate not being that high when you take out a vanishingly small chunk of sexworkers, yet yaddayadda Trans genocide.
No I understand the point, I disagree with you that it matters much. "Sure he's wrong but at least he's vaguely directionally correct in this particular interpretation" is just "he's wrong" to me. He's using all the government rhetoric and resources to target the wrong things when he has every opportunity and resource to have a better and more nuanced and more correct view.
He's actually worse than a similar person who believes the "autism epidemic" is real and doesn't use it to blame vaccines cause at least that similar person isn't going to be behind the deaths and sickness of tons of kids.
It's exactly the same. Something that people if they bothered at all could easily see the real facts (autism epidemic isn't real, data centers don't use much water, whatever) but not only refuse to update themselves on it and focus on actual issues, but get angry at the very idea of it.
The trans issue makes everyone insane and stupid. There is no trans genocide epidemic and there is no trans mass shooting epidemics, violence is incredibly rare in all directions from most groups in the modern world. The only things that really kill you when you're young is drug overdoses, car accidents and by your own hand. If you don't get into trouble like gangs or hanging around the very few kill streets you're exceedingly unlikely to be murdered no matter who or what you are. Humans have always been like this to some degree, but ever since telecommunications allowed stories to spread from far away we can get flooded with a deluge of horrific but very rare examples that makes violence and crime seem far more common than it actually is.
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I don't personally care that much about the victim complex per se. That's eternal. What I care about is real politics being done according to those grievances and the downstream societal damage. And that's hard to deny. Though that's kind of been the story of the entire 21st century so far I suppose.
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