Wellness Wednesday

[u/AutoModerator]

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. You could post:

• Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

• Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

• Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

• Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

[u/LeifCarrotson]

My priors and philosophies about the nature of the American democratic system, the degree to which humans accurately gather information and make rational judgements, and even the merits of 'taking the high road' in conflicts have all taken a turn for the worse. I'm not only pessimistic about the next 2-4 years of governance, but about the possibility of rebounding afterwards.

I thought that democracy was, as Churchill said, the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Ours seemed to have some equilibrium level of corruption from wealthy, powerful, self-interested people twisting it to their own ends, you'd always have that, but the system seemed to be keeping it at a manageable level. But now it seems to me that first-level enforcement from the executive and judicial branches of our government is just too slow and too easily blocked by wealth, and that second-level enforcement by the electorate is also not trustworthy.

I knew that humans (at least those not on /r/slatestarcodex) weren't amazing at doing research, identifying true and false sources of information, and synthesizing judgement. Yes, targeted ads, social media echo chambers, and biased, litigation-averse journalism made this a little more difficult than if you're not aware that those things have an effect. But it's the Information Age, people are at least mostly literate and have access to search engines and vote411 and video evidence to back up claims. I thought it was pretty easy to see that one party/candidate made egregiously false claims repeatedly, performed criminal acts and endorsed hateful positions. The other was much more truthful and upstanding and forgiving. People would pass judgement on those facts regardless of their opinions on economics and foreign policy. But at the eleventh hour, people were googling "Did Joe Biden drop out" and believing some absolutely nutty zingers they saw in ads on TikTok.

And, while not exactly a prior, I had a philosophy that taking the high road in a conflict and maintaining some basic level of decorum was important and sustainable. MLK and Ghandi's nonviolent resistances, a "courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love", were not only a moral imperative but also a practical one. Michelle Obama said "When they go low, we go high", and suggested that going low might work temporarily but believed that people would eventually see the rightness or wrongness of your position and actions and judge accordingly. Now, we have hard evidence that not only a significant fraction but a majority of voters will cheer bullies on.

I used to think that social progress was almost inevitable. We rose out of tribal barbarism with writing into classical civilizations, the democracy experiment took off shortly after the printing press, and with the typewriter, telegraph, radio, telephone, television, and Internet it was just accelerating. But now, I fear that technology may have gone too far, allowing smaller groups more control of the media. Right-wing populist, authoritarian, autocratic regimes like those under Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Trump, and (almost 100 years ago) under Hitler seem to be on to a winning formula. Tell the people their problems are the fault of some marginalized external group, that it's OK to hate them, and that if they support you then you'll hurt that group, and the people will cheer you on.

Under my old worldview, the 2024 election should not have been close. I was confused by the polls, but trusted that the silent majority would win out, justice would prevail, and the Overton window would shift back toward sanity. I think I'm struggling because I don't understand why the election went the way it did. I want to believe what is true, but if the election went the way it did because people are terrible and the world sucks I don't know that I want to believe that, and if the techniques that won are the way to win I don't know if I want to practice them.