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‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Grifters, con-artists and fascists all use the truth to sell a lie. The truth is that we have been steadily raised on a diet of mass produced garbage, optimised purely for profit while disregarding all public and environmental welfare in its construction and delivery. The lie is that the grifters, con-artists and fascists are not just doing the exact same thing to the extreme.
They offer what they call good, wholesome and honest solutions to contrast with the big globalist elitist fat-cats selling expensive unnatural poisons. But natural or synthetic, poisons can kill you the same type of dead.
It makes sense that the people who will believe one category of such "simple and easy explanations and solutions" will also believe other categories of "simple and easy explanations and solutions" - believing crystals will help you tune your soul to feel better might not at all be the same thing as believing all the problems of society are due to people with the least power in it (immigrants, the "lazy" poor) but it certainly is the product of the same kind of cognitive take on the World and emotional desire for understandable "explanations" and silver-bullet "solutions" so the path from one to the next is way shorter than it might seem if all one looks at is the information space rather than the psychological and intellectual characteristics of the "believers".
Or to put it in cruder terms: both kinds of outlook in the World appeal to the the same kind of sucker.
I think it's important to realize that almost everyone is at least occasionally a sucker. There's a grift that targets basically every personality type. There's grift for health conscious folks, for worried parents, for 'I'm so much smarter than others', for gamers, for outdoorsy types, there's something for everyone. If you aren't careful you'll be laughing at the other 'idiots' while you yourself fall into a different trap.
Honestly once you start paying attention it's really scary how many different and seemingly totally unrelated topics can be used to pull people into facism. So many times I've clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.
The strange thing to me is how much the Youtube search results and suggestions have changed, even just in the last few months. I mostly go there to listen to music and I used to get stuff I was actually interested in.
Yesterday I went looking for a specific video. Of the top 15 results, only 2 were close to what I wanted. It wasn't even the top 2. One relevant result, then a bunch of political clickbait. Zero connection to music. And the autoplay will feed you the same thing if it's on.
A couple weeks ago, YouTube was still giving me a whopping 3 relevant results at the top before turning on the BS algorithm hose.
It’s the anger / fear feedback loop.
The more angry / scared you become, the more videos you watch. The more you watch the more angry / scared you become…. etc.
The more you watch the more money YT makes. And that’s all they care about.
I watched one youtube video which contained a complete takedown and exposure of Tucker Carlson and his lies (back when he was on Fox). Of course this meant that youtube thought I was interested in Tucker Carlson, so immediately all my recommendations was to actual official Tucker Carlson videos and similar right wing talking heads.
I had to expunge the anti-Tucker Carlson video from my viewing history to get rid of all those shitty recommendations.
I agree that at in some ways and at some points in time we're all suckers.
I once was scammed and analysing the whole thing later I had to admit the scammer came at in the right ways to get me to draw the conclusions that better served his objectives and use my wants against myself.
Frankly, I both was impressed and was felt it as quite an eye opener on my own blindsides and the limits of intelligence.
Not saying he was an amazing scammer and that's only why I was scammed (frankly I have no idea were in the hierarchy of scam artists the guy was), rather that, as you pointed out, we're all suckers in some way or another.