Most of us
do still like each other, if we can get past the mediation of our conversations by platforms and the kind of tribalism it inculcates. I just wrote this rant here. It's hard to put into words what I see happening, but I'm trying desperately because I think there needs to be a framework for understanding it. Which I'm not eloquent enough to state, but I hope people can build on these simple statements like "Most of us still like each other".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30584851The machine thrives on fear. Twitter is a rage machine... its function is to generate tribal anger and mass hysteria, and its mechanism and chief innovation for doing so is shortening the language. When everything is a soundbite, nothing real can be expressed, only affiliation with one group or another. Any thought that tries to explore both sides of a conversation and weigh their relative merits requires more characters than Twitter allows, and that's by design. We sleepwalked into this.
/Rant. About your point about enjoying killing and carnage, it was also something Hannah Arendt talked about extensively, and we can see it on both sides of the political spectrum in America now, both "mobs" of totalitarian/authoritarians. It's the end equilibrium of the totalitarian state to have generations of killers weaned on brutality who enjoy it for its own sake, and in theory the normalization or stabilization of a state which breeds those minds is the most frightening thing for the future of humanity. Nazi Germany was almost there.
I'm still trying to formulate this. But I've begun to come to the conclusion that the only important thing is to stop thinking in terms of who's right or wrong. The only way for civilization forward is to re-introduce the civic principle, to enforce the rules of debate; to ingrain the reflexive ability to absorb the other person's point of view and see them as a human like yourself; even if you believe they are wrong. The ability to put their wrongness into context so you can accept it and treat them as an equal before you go about dismantling their arguments. Without that, we're just bloodthirsty savages. And that, sadly, seems like the way it's going.
