Sorry if the premise is inflammatory, but I’ve been stymied by this for a while. How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country? I get it - not everything is bad now, and not everything was good then. FDR’s internment camps, etc.
That said - our country seems to be at a low point in intellectualism and accountability. The DHHS head is an antivaxxer, the deputy chief of the DOJ is a far-right podcast nutball, etc. Their supporters seem to have no nuance to their opinion beyond “well, Trump said he’d fix the economy and I don’t like woke.”
Have people always been this unserious and unquestioning, or are we watching the public’s sanity unravel in real time? Or am I just imagining some idealistic version of the past that never existed, where politicians acted in good faith and people cared about the social order?
Read that short column by Asimov elsewhere in the thread. It’s a photo of a column in Newsweek so it should be easy to find. It was written in 1980 - three and a half years before I was born, and he’s bemoaning anti-intellectualism and the rising acceptance of ignorance being just as valuable as the opinion of an expert.
If he could have seen what the internet has done, social media specifically, I can’t imagine what he’d think. Social media with 24/7 access to anything that will tell you what you feel in your gut is right. Yeah, we’re dumber than we’ve ever been since before literacy became ubiquitous.
You call it an filtered version of history and you’re exactly right. I’d say it’s more filtered than ever before. Not just history is filtered but the very evidence of the current day from your eyes and ears is filtered in real time.