Hey folks, I've been asleep for the past few hundred years. Can't wait to see how the profit motive has universally overlapped with providing the most utility to society! Such a neat little hack.
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Uh oh. Uhhhh... Oh no...
BrotherL0v3
joined 2 years ago
Short and too on the nose but I needed to get this out of my head. Thanks for reading!
You bring up a good point, but I don't think religion necessarily involves the kind of unreality I have in mind.
A lot of religious claims deal with things that are unfalsifiable. Invisible forces, unreachable gods, consciousness after death, things like that. Not the most rational stuff in the world, but not obviously false on the face of it either.
Now, though, we've got folks believing things that are easily disproven. Climate change denial, anti-vaccine bullshit, the never-ending parade of moral panics churned out by the above mentioned propaganda machine, Jewish space lasers, pet eating immigrants, etc.
I won't go so far as to say that religion never causes people to deny observable reality; it surely does. But I think the right wing media empire we have now does so intentionally and on a scale greater than any religious movement I can think of.
The bad news: The most evil people in the world spend billions every year on the largest propaganda machine in the history of man, and it enthralls a large minority of us.
The good news: That's what it takes to maintain this! This many people living in a bubble of unreality is not natural! It is the product of a machine built by man, and all machines built by man are destined to eventually fail. Maybe the right person dies at the right time. Maybe the conflict between their narrative and reality eventually becomes too much. Maybe they lose control of the story and the movement splinters into hundreds of contradictory conspiracy theories that no longer move in lockstep. Maybe the magic just wears off one day.
He also loves money and has no principles. People doing something because they have values is just not something he understands.
A-fucking-men! Things can change fast, be ready to throw down!
I feel like there's this explot in human psychology:
People are pretty bad at matching causes to effects.
Doing something novel / outside your usual routine can feel pretty good, regardless of what it is you're doing.
Therefore: People who try weird diets, snake oils, or letting the sun shine on their asshole really do feel better afterwards, at least for a while. That must mean it works!