How to Destroy a Generation | Hacker News Reader

How to Destroy a Generation

joanwestenberg.com

32 pointsleotravis1011 comments

Whether the author likes it or not, the emotional manipulation genie is out of the bottle. We cannot compete with hundreds of industrial psychologists using attachment theory to bind us to brands, and outrage to sell clicks. We'd have to reorganize our society to reverse the incentive structure of the current arrangement which is ideologically forbidden.

Instead it's easy to predict what will come. Those who are particularly affect will have their consequences individualized - it will be a personal moral failure on their part succumbing to the consequences of that influence, or greedy marketeers, or sadly simply "the way the world works" unable to even be reformed lest we unleash even more negative consequences.

The way out is never back, it's through and it's structural. We used to be able to imagine a different world, a better world.

I've got news for the author: humans are slightly more clever, slightly less hairy apes, and our feelings have always dominated our logic, what little we have of the latter. You don't have to destroy a generation, because every generation will naturally find various ways to destroy itself.

We evolved to be part of small hunter-gatherer groups. Farming, and thus civilization, is surprisingly recent, a mere 10,000 years old or so. Our monkey brains were never prepared to live together in large anonymous cultures. We are the sorcerer's apprentices, except there's no sorcerer. Our leaders are of the same genetic stock and as apelike as the rest of us.

It reminds me of this quote.

“We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I think people are thinking of "generation" wrong in this context. It need not mean people born in the 60s or 80s or 2000s, but just the people alive and involved in the social sphere during a time - like right now. I think we have seen a lot of this manipulation across media for the last decade or two but taken to extremes. Whether you are liberal or conservative or something else, many media outlets are spinning a tale that your rights are being violated and the others are bad people who wish to deny you of those rights. Even the same people yelling about their first amendment rights are simultaneously blocking and banning those who have opposing views on any topic. The Us vs Them mentality is being cultivated all around. Taken far enough that people legitimately feel like their existence is under threat, those telling the story can get you to do almost anything, like shoot up a mosque or trash the capital.

It's nothing new. The Nazis, the Cold War, the Satanic panic - we see examples throughout history of how this can lead people to do terrible things.

But I bet a lot of people aren't even aware this is happening to them. Sometimes you need someone to point out the elephant in the room.

Your entirely correct about the US vs Them mentality. We are no longer only divided by the political aisle, or differing principles of faith. Now we are further gender divided into Male/Female more than ever, despite those very baseline concepts failing to accurately define humans as they currently exist in a modern society. I don't just mean physically, I'm more meaning our understandings of those ideas themselves, how we expect a Man or Woman to act.

We are also divided by timeline generations - not only age bc with in say the Boomer generation, even if all fall within the same 10-20 years generation, they don't all agree.

All structures in our society are divided against all the rest and themselves - the GOP vs Trumpers, Dems vs Progressives, the GLBTQ community vs the T in that acronym.

None of this is the base division along what used to be thought of realist vs pragmatic vs liberal.

All the old divisions like racism, sexism, elitism, etc - they got a fresh look and a rerelease to catch the trending hate now.

None of this is OK or Right and everyone knows themselves or people they don't correct, are behaving out of line - nobody will admit it til after the craziness stops, it's like willful ignorance, with the lines of the winner writes the history - if Trumpers can just ride out the racist wall and the world doesn't get too bad, they can all laugh about it later, for example. We've crossed so many lines nothing is sacred now, we can't see it, our behavior, or hear the insanity coming out our mouths - all our defense mechanisms to keep us in the box we picked.

Anyways, Germans woke up after WWII and that same generation that formed the core of then German society passed laws like making Holocaust Denial illegal.

The truth will always eventually beat out lies, no matter how defended, propped up or much we've chosen to believe the lies.

Like how its the Mexicans fault the US economy is unaffordable or how it's poor people's fault they are poor - YOUR fault if YOU are - both of those are equally bullshit.

Our house is divided and we are willing to even fight each other that division but it's all really just children's blames games - the rampant use of "whataboutisms" as if they DO ACTUALLY JUSTIFY actions is my case in point - they don't, never have, will never in the future and is an easy way to automatically render your opinion less than anyone who doesn't make an argument that 2 wrong make a right, that's Sunday school lessons fr.

Everyone is so sensitive and snowflakes bc their opinions and the facts in their heads allow them a foundation as strong as a house of cards - they kno that so fundamentally they are insecure and everybody "thinks they are less" but really just them.

tbh, in rl - nobody gives a fuck about another person beyond how it relates to them, we kno this personally but still lose sleep over how the copies of people that exists in our heads will tell us they feel about w/e - the real ppl don't feel or think what we all pretend they do... unless it relates to them.

Individual people have to wake the f up to who they are and who they are not.

Self examination, self assessment, self awareness - these are all elephants we all have but only if we identify for ourselves the elephant can we become aware of them.

Typically we only the above "self" stuff when everything stops bc its all fallen apart around us and we have to think a little.

Maybe lets not do that as a society? ALL of KNOW ALREADY what they say about a house divided against itself.

Our head is the first house divided against itself.

Sry - it's been a bit since I ranted and this is a bit of a button for me.

tl:Dr: I agree! Excellent assessment. Have an awesome day.

> Your entirely correct about US vs Them ...

It is more appropriately called by its wartime use, divide and conquer, if you have no working communications, no organization or counteraction can occur.

The ostrich gets eaten while its head is buried in the sand.

Frogs get boiled when they don't notice the temperature going up.

> Its willful ignorance

Its more than that, its willful blindness to the consequences of their actions.

The dynamics are common in transitional stages from the "banality of evil" which becomes the "radical evil". Its not surprising that Complacency is sloth.

System's have a way of enabling great acts of evil by chopping up the objectionable parts.

Quite a large number of people are nihilistic, and believe at some core level that if they didn't know they were doing something wrong then they aren't responsible for their actions. They then make it a point to make it so they never know they are doing wrong.

As for the divisiveness, it can be summed up as "Critical Theory", and most are able to figure out where and what groups are responsible for that with a little research.

Tolstoy was wrong in his live and let live in some respects. Destructive behaviors beget increasingly more destructive behaviors unless stopped, embracing falsehoods as truth is one of the most destructive behaviors out there, and being unable to communicate or counteract them guarantees only one outcome for the people in that sphere of influence.

> But I bet a lot of people aren't even aware this is happening to them.

That is the nature of this particular science, and the nail has been in the coffin on this since the 1950s.

There are the people that know it exists, but would have others believe it doesn't because they have a vested interest or benefit in doing so (in control), and then there are those that believe it doesn't exist (the victims).

They are indoctrinated since childhood by depriving them of real education (based in greek curricula), into delusional patterns.

The people who know it exists, and how it works, and try to help people are a extreme rarity albeit very much appreciated by those they do manage to help.

Unfortunately, these people almost always categorically get punished in one way or another until they stop giving their goodwill away, which then creates a self-fulfilling dynamic, where destruction, loss, and calamity are inevitable and must occur before the majority can ever notice a problem or consider the danger.

That is unfortunately, the nature of delusion and schizophrenia during such times (which are common under totalitarianism). Its described quite prominently in writings on how the Nazi's were post-loss during WW2.

> Sometimes you need someone to point out the elephant in the room.

Sometimes you just need to let the dynamics take their course.

Pointing out the elephant doesn't do anything, the people invested in such systems don't want to think, they enjoy the surety of their limited agency, their lack of choice. There is no mystery, they have the existence they want, and they want to impose it on others. This too is part of totalitarianism.

No amount of saying something will make such people listen, their minds are inflexible because they have been made that way.

You have the same issues with cult victims.

Eh, for all the talk about a generation, this feels like it could apply to every generation on social media. Doesn't matter whether they're boomers or generation X, millennials or generation z or generation alpha, they've often withdrawn into echo chambers that reinforce their every belief and lost the ability to think critically about their views (if that was ever a thing before).

But to be honest, something about this article strikes me as either inauthentic or 'off'. Like, it's very light on concrete details or analysis, and written in such a way that it could be applied to whatever group the reader dislikes the most. Admit it, when you read this, who do you think it's talking about? Gen Z with TikTok and Instagram echo chambers? Boomers with Facebook and Fox News? Millennials with Twitter and Reddit and YouTube? Someone else entirely?

The answer is whichever group you're not part of. Or maybe the one you are. It's just so wishy washy with how it's written and so non specific that it feels designed to trigger an emotional response rather than start a debate.

The notion about "groups" is nowhere in the article. Your comment, however, is written as if belonging to some group is necessary. Worse, your comment delineates the example groups it gives based on social media apps!

...and there's the irony. Because in my view, this unquenchable need to tribalize and to identify enemy tribes is a direct consequence of the crisis described in the article. Which is fully aligned with my day to day experience BTW.

One could argue it goes back all the way to what was arguably the first high bandwidth, 'real-time', one-to-many socially connective technology - radio. Before that, connectivity was a lot slower, and you wouldn't waste things like the telegraph system on frivolous things.

This thesis seems like it could apply to any generation that has achieved a level of sufficient material development to focus on issues higher up on Maslow’s Hierarchy. The postwar boomers. The post-Cold War millennials. Mass media and consumer affluence fuels it, but I don’t think either alone is sufficient.

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