this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
432 points (99.3% liked)
The Onion
4573 readers
1535 users here now
The Onion
A place to share and discuss stories from The Onion, Clickhole, and other satire.
Great Satire Writing:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It is a little.
People are wired to trust confident people. The problem is the smartest people know no plan is perfect, evaluate possible problems and have a plan to handle them.
That comes off as doubt.
But an idiot will never worry about problems that haven't shown up yet, they'll run forward with 100% confidence till they go off a cliff like Wiley Coyote. Then blame the people who said that would happen and claim they made it not work by verbalizing possible complications.
And I know that sounds like trump supporters, because it is them.
It's also the Biden supporters who kept insisting he could beat Trump and prevented us from having a competitive primary where Dem voters had a say in the candidate.
They blamed Dem voters for saying Dem voters didn't want Biden.
And they blamed Dem voters for talking about how Kamala needed to stop moving to the right or trump would win.
And when trump won, they immediately started blaming everyone that pulled the fire alarm for setting the fire.
Brexit is the ur-example of this. We said it would hurt the economy, they blamed us for talking the economy down with our fear mongering.
Yep, same thing that made humans burn medicine women as witches.
It's basic psychology, all animals are pattern recognition machines, and we get stressed when we don't understand the cause of something.
And we don't need a correct or even plausible thing to blame, as long as there's some scapegoat and your ingroup all blames the same thing, as far as our brains are concerned, the matter is settled. Even if we're still upset at the negative consequences, we now have something to blame so our brains stop worrying about it, the matter is settled.
Where it's maladaptive is if we just blame random shit like Zeus being mad that someone ate a goat burger with cheese on a Friday, we don't address what the actual cause was, so we get the negative consequence again.