I would highly recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death if you are looking to understand how the populace got to the point where truth is irrelevant and nothing really matters.

It helped my mental model a lot at the very least.

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AndrewKemendo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I’m extremely aware of amusing ourselves to death

I think we came away with very different conclusions

To me it is abject proof that individuals do not have the mental emotional or other capacity to actually behave in the modern world such that they retain their mental independence and develop a sense of personal epistemology

Humans are way too dumb and prone to propaganda to actually have a coherent society at the scale needed so that we don’t collectively kill each other through poorly identified and attributed externalities

	▲	eunoia 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Unfortunately I think we actually agree on this and did come away with the same conclusions.
	▲	specialist 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I believe, but cannot prove, that our malleability was an evolutionary advantage. It enabled homo sapiens to gather in ever larger social groups. Media, from obelisks to tiktok, enables exploitation of our evolutionary quirk.