We can lay a lot of blame for this change on the internet. The interconnection of the world’s knowledge was expected to democratize education. Instead, and particularly with the advent of social media, it has democratized cherry-picking. The internet universalized subjectivity instead of objectivity.
This is broadly the issue: We have reverted from acting on what we know to acting on what we think.
The internet didn’t give us Donald Trump. It didn’t “do” this to us. We did it ourselves. The internet is just the mirror that shows us how fragmented and disconnected we always were. It is the glass we are still seeing through darkly. I grew up thinking the New Deal was universally praised, as was WWII. My father was born in 1926 and 50 years later still disdained the New Deal and its products like the WPA (“We Piddle Around”). There’s a character in “The Best Years Of Our Lives” who condemns the war just ended as a waste of men and political effort. He clearly reflects an opinion that existed throughout the war, and at its “triumphal” end.
The internet just disabused us, again, of our mythology and fantasy. And still we want to blame it, blame something, rather than take responsibility for what we do.
It’s still the same old story. And we never grow up.
(I have to add that it was “objectivity” that gave us colonialism and imperialism. It was multiculturalism and religion that taught us to abhor slavery, reject racism and the remnants of colonialist thinking, and begin to reject the “-isms” that made us “other” people we should have regarded as being as human as “us.” I’m old enough to remember when all those challenges to the status quo were critiqued for being “subjective” rather than “objective.” Vague and glittering generalizations do not a sound argument make. Though they too often pass for an “objective” one.)
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