this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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This makes a kind of sense. If you assume they're not listening to any of the words, but just the tone, then I guess that might explain things. But I don't want to think so many people are acting like literal dogs.
Picture this:
This is the position of a non-aligned voter in present day politics.
In such a situation, people will either just go "I chose no story" (i.e. "all politicians are liars") or try and figure out who is the most trustworthy of those telling the stories, via indirect things (remember, people can't even directly speak with, much less interrogate the story tellers), so they will try and gauge a storyteller's trustworthiness based on how they talk, their posture and expression, the format of their storytelling, things they know about them outside the storytelling and so on and as part of that they will for example be less likely to trust those who look like or sound like previous story tellers who later turned out to be deceitful or even lying (and the more in the past they've been exposed to a certain type of story teller that turned out to be deceitfull, the least likely they will be to believe that story telling style).
It's this dynamic in choosing who to trust that modern populists like Trump are exploiting.
Curiously at other points in Time, after a period when the populists were in power fucking things up, the same dynamic worked to help the serious sounding highly educated style of storytelling gain power from the populists - at a high level and over longer periods (decades), the process is actually an oscillating system.
The first and last points are flawed, though.
Sometimes the issues are like "We should ban books" vs "We shouldn't ban books". They're not slightly different so much as opposites. For something like "income tax should stop at 40% vs 80%" sure, but a lot of what's on the table now is not that nuanced.
Which leads me to
This implies that information and truth is unknowable. That you can't open up wikipedia, click through to sources, read a book. You shouldn't have to go solely on "does their body language seem confident?". This is supposed to be the information age!
But I guess a lot of people cannot read well, and certainly don't know how to determine what's a good source and what's not. I've seen people just go by some youtube video some nobody made and... oh, I see the problem. If you assume everyone and everything is just as credible as anything else, even some pseudonymous youtube video, knowing anything becomes dubious. Maybe this is why you have "Four dozen studies from nineteen universities have shown human activity is contributing to climate change" -> "well, CoolDog420 on their youtube channel said it's just because the sun is having PMS, and I like his videos."
That assumption that all things are equally credible is really bad. In college I took an intro to journalism course as an elective, and one of our first assignments was to go through a list of sources and determine which ones were good and which were not. Some were partisan think tanks, some were actually satire, some were real. It was a good exercise. Some students got taken in by all of it, and I think benefited from the professor walking them through how to investigate.
This is probably all downstream from under-investing (or outright sabotaging) public education.
I don't know how to fix this.