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Comment by nescioquid | Hacker News Reader

Chris Hedges sometimes remarks that he finds people turn towards superstitious, religious, or conspiratorial world views when they find they have no control over their lives. I suspect that if the US somehow changed so that economic security were increased for most people, there would be much less unreason and general discourse wouldn't be so mean.

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That's an interesting theory, although I doubt that 19th century US farmers, among the most self-sufficient people in history, were lacking in religion, superstition, or conspiracies.

In fairness, it is trivial to point to any number of counter-examples throughout history if you just want to dismiss the observation. Hedges is a journalist and was referring to the changes he saw in the squeezed middle and lower classes through his career, and probably wasn't making a sweeping historic claim.

I mentioned it as contrast to the parent comment who simply concluded people are incapable of rational thought, and meant to suggest there are mediating influences.

> if you just want to dismiss the observation.

I'm not and I'm willing to give it a chance. I'm just not seeing a strong correlation.

What I do see people doing when they lack control is to attempt to gain control. Put together a group, grab some of that sweet power through mass. The more ambitious ones fight their way up the power structure. Special bonus points if you can take over an existing seat of power.

> What I do see people doing when they lack control is to attempt to gain control.

One way in which people gain (the feeling of) control is to imagine the world differently (superstition, conspiracy, religion) in a way that makes them virtuous or special and others not (i.e. essentially Nietzsche's idea of ressentiment). If you haven't the power to take part in a real struggle, this is not so surprising to me.

That's a good point.

Perhaps the temptation is to choose philosophies that have the appearance of power. Sticking pins in a voodoo doll of your boss, Mr. Scrooge for example.

Some acquaintances of mine did that at their job once and it worked a charm. The boss was permanently off on sick leave within a month. Maybe there's something to it.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Farmers through all of history and to this day are absolutely never self-sufficient. They are at the mercy of 'the gods', aka the weather, at all times. One bad flood, one freeze, one week of ill-timed rain, and they are destitute. That's the perfect environment to breed superstition.

19th century US farmers

They were self-sufficient in the sense that there was no one coming to help in case of emergency. That doesn't mean they ever felt secure. Entire families regularly died for one or more of dozens of causes: starvation, freezing weather, tornadoes, human sickness, livestock sickness, crop failure, drought, dangerous animals, Indian attack, crime, etc. Some of them might have pretended at a "control over their lives", but few modern Americans would trade places with them.

I think im general I believe that theory to be true, but that doesn't explain all the well fed boomers that went full Qanon. They have retirement accounts, own their houses, a few nice vehicles out front, a boat, maybe a second property, etc.

These people ended up being Qanon's bread and butter. From the outside in they seem in control of their lives, but maybe it's all a ruse.

My father said something interesting to me once (he's a boomer of course): "Most people in my generation have this sense somewhere deep inside that they failed, but they're not sure exactly what they failed at."

Hunter S. Thompson wrote extensively on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3iKBxJ9vQ0

Only a small percentage of that generation were into the specific sort of counterculture Thompson was steeped in, but the whole cultural zeitgeist of the generation was wrapped up in various forms of either political or mystical idealism or a heavily marketed idea that scientific or technological progress would deliver giant miracles in short order. These people expected some kind of big, glorious future and they feel like it just didn't come.

Nice retirement accounts and second houses was not "the dream." The dream was something bigger, an "ultimate triumph" as Thompson calls it, and they feel like they never quite reached it.

Instead they got the 1970s when it all seemed to crash down in a wave of urban crime, drug hangovers, crazy cults, serial killers of the week, pollution, and stagflation. Keep on truckin'!

A good number of them are still looking for "it." Apocalyptic evangelical Christianity with its rapture tapped into this. The unbalanced Internet techno-utopianism of the 90s and Singulatarianism tapped into this. Qanon's language tapped into this.

I'm a young gen-Xer or old millennial depending on how you count it. As a rule my generation is a bit jaded on movements and idealism, partly as a reaction to what many of us see as the delusional thinking of our parents.

I hope to leave the world better than I found it, but I don't expect some kind of shining utopia to rise from the waves. If we manage to solve the big problems of our era like climate change, sustainability, and wealth inequality, their absence will merely reveal other big problems that were building under the surface. Life is beautiful and fascinating but it's also a perpetual struggle against entropy.

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