this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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The bad news: The most evil people in the world spend billions every year on the largest propaganda machine in the history of man, and it enthralls a large minority of us.
The good news: That's what it takes to maintain this! This many people living in a bubble of unreality is not natural! It is the product of a machine built by man, and all machines built by man are destined to eventually fail. Maybe the right person dies at the right time. Maybe the conflict between their narrative and reality eventually becomes too much. Maybe they lose control of the story and the movement splinters into hundreds of contradictory conspiracy theories that no longer move in lockstep. Maybe the magic just wears off one day.
Counterpoint is religion. 75% right now live in unreality. Minimum. Not a minority.
It's been like this since the beginning of written history. It doesn't seem we can break free so far.
Because it's the vast majority, my mere pointing it out will risk ire.
You bring up a good point, but I don't think religion necessarily involves the kind of unreality I have in mind.
A lot of religious claims deal with things that are unfalsifiable. Invisible forces, unreachable gods, consciousness after death, things like that. Not the most rational stuff in the world, but not obviously false on the face of it either.
Now, though, we've got folks believing things that are easily disproven. Climate change denial, anti-vaccine bullshit, the never-ending parade of moral panics churned out by the above mentioned propaganda machine, Jewish space lasers, pet eating immigrants, etc.
I won't go so far as to say that religion never causes people to deny observable reality; it surely does. But I think the right wing media empire we have now does so intentionally and on a scale greater than any religious movement I can think of.
I think it's the same thing. Same weakness or flaw in humans exploited in all your examples. With the same selfish goals driven by the same bad people as the "right winger" leadership as you call them throughout history.