[Title] Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 1828: Theme issue βFoundations of cultural evolutionβ
[ISBN] 9781782525295
[PUBLISHER] The Royal Society
[Link] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2021/376/1828
My view is this. The 20th century and social media have moderately to severely exacerbated the simplification of viewpoints and discussion topics already found in humans; the proclivity to simplify the oppositions argument as a way to cut corners on concepts to understand them more easily has been made worse by volatile ideologies over the past 100 years.
The reason I think it is not all the 20th centurys' and social medias fault is that this attitude can be seen if you go back in time as well to watch discussions regarding politics - I want to be clear that I only think of the last centurys' political and technological trends as having a negative impact but on a trend already demonstrated by humanity. Additionally the trend I'm seeing could be the result of it being more easy for people to share their opinion due to the increasing "democritisation of information" just due to the accessibility of social media but I digress.
The actions taken by the Third Reich in the 20th century horrified all who were made aware of it: the nature of WWII and of the holocaust need no introduction by me (this may be apart of this wider problem I'll go into with bandwith issues but again I digress) It seems possible to me that due to such horrific acts being commited by "Ordinary Men", of whom's political aims they themselves thought were righteous, that people in at least the West had as a result naturally defaulted to a state of defense when their beliefs are questioned and a state of offense when someone else has a different viewpoint to them. I'll return to this later
2 years post WWII the Cold War began. If you don't know about the Cold War then it can be described well as the geopolitical tension between America and Russia over who should have Western power post WWII due to their alliance in helping to stop the International Nazi Takeover that had started by invasion of Poland on the 1st of September 1939. The atmosphere geopolitically amongst the public from 1947 to 1991 was that if you weren't Pro-America then you were a Communist. "Communist until proven guilty" This kind of culture seems to be inadvertently created by a government that likely rightly wanted to guard against the nuclear end times and Communist takeover that so many in the time had feared as it went against eveyething that was American to them. This was, I predict, the next major step in the inflammation of the divisive "political-razor"
After this came, as organisms have always tried to propega
... keep reading on reddit β‘
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