US Authoritarianism

Most people don’t give a shit about appointing Supreme Court Justices, immigration policy, monetary policy, disaster preparedness, etc. They just wanna look at a politician and say “Yeah, they’d probably be my friend if we met” and that’s it.

It goes deeper and worse than this. Worse as in, for our long-term survival.

The problem is as a species we are incredibly vulnerable to this kind of effect, because we are not nearly as advanced or logical as we like to imagine. We have brains that serve only one purpose, which is invent a story to explain your feelings, and that story doesn't even have to make sense. This was an amazing adaptation a half million years ago for surviving the natural world.

But we're very far from the natural world, and the same responses that helped us figure out how to survive dangers are now being exploited to hoist people to positions of power at the cost of our environment, our health and happiness and our promise of a future.

And it's about to get so, so much worse. We're about to get thrust into an era of LLM's just fucking with people's emotional storytelling to a fantastic degree. Our world is teetering on climate collapse and every person is withdrawing further and further from socializing with each other and we're barreling towards a world where nobody will have any idea what's real or not and education will become less and less valuable.

I've been watching our world for decades now, and I am seeing this trend mature and I'm very worried for all our futures.