Why has society gone off the rails starting in 2014?

[CmdrShep2154]

It seems like ever since 2014 politics and society has gotten more and more batshit insane. What has happened? Economic inequality making us more stressed and angry? It the narcissism that is infecting both sides of the political spectrum. I notice some people who were non political becoming political extremists overnight back in 2016.

[Deleted]

People have it to good so they come up with all kinds of bullshit to satisfy their hollow existence. 12 hours of field ploughing per day would cure it very efficiently.

[Deleted]

I'd say humanity entered a state of regression when the internet became widely used.

[CmdrShep2154]

I'd say humanity entered a state of regression when the internet became widely used.

Would you say your the type of person who says the internet is cancer?

[Deleted]

Internet and social media pretty much got everything to do with it. Not that they're individually bad things, but they've served as platforms for chaos to rise from, as you're pointing out.

Prior to social media every village had a village idiot that was largely ignored and cast aside. Social media enabled all the village idiots of all the villages to get together and be louder, more obvious idiots. It's pretty much gone down hill from here.

Also, social media allows lies to be peddled so, so easily.

[Deleted]

[CatsNeverDie]

This topic reminds me of the saying "little knowledge/learning is a dangerous thing". That is the basic reason behind everyone being strongly opinionated on political matters, because they don't have deep knowledge about matters. People get easily herded like sheep with little information and used, without realizing it.

[wartech]

Post 9/11 24 hour news cycles and social media has brought out the worst in people for sure. People like Roger Ailes who founded Fox News with the vision of merging news and sensational theater thus scaring the crap out of, and radicalizing huge sloths of the conservative voter base also didn't help either and when the 08 financial crisis happened there was a whole demographic of voters at the ready to vote for the most batshit, cynical Tea party politicians which essentially has now become the conventional GOP. Although cynical fuckbags in the Republican party can obviously be found as far back as the Republican revolution during the Clinton era with assholes like Newt Gingrich at the spearhead. Short version of this is I think the radicalization of the Conservative base has been a slow moving ball that has now reached its natural conclusion in the form of people like Donald Trump.

The Left side equivalent is a little harder to pin down, but I think ever since the civil rights movement in the 60's, when politics suddenly wasn't just about the contents of your wallet anymore, but your entire identity as a human being, politics became far more personal, and across the isle compromise or even camraderie has slowly become rarer to find since. Politics is in everything now. Anything that CAN be politicized WILL be politicized. Hillary Clinton and the Democrats cynically dropped the ball on traditional Democrat issues, such as the working class, in favor of identity politics. That was bad. Having that said however, I honestly can't, no matter how objective I try to be, view the Democrats as anywhere near as cynical and demagogic as the Republicans. Accepting Donald Trump into the fold has in my mind been the official delegitimizer of the GOP, and many Conservatives agree.

Lets not lose total track of history, however. There was an actual civil war. There was an ACTUAL Red scare and McCarthy era(a term Trump supporters through around WAY too losely). Things may be batshit crazy right now, but America has flirted with crazy for quite some time in its relatively short history as a nation, so this isn't entirely new.

[Kathandira]

It seems like ever since 2014 politics and society has gotten more and more batshit insane. What has happened? Economic inequality making us more stressed and angry? It the narcissism that is infecting both sides of the political spectrum. I notice some people who were non political becoming political extremists overnight back in 2016.

Not saying this is the sole reason for thinking that way, but part of it might simply be due to getting older, and paying more attention to these things. Politics have been a mess for longer than I've been alive, but it has only been about a decade or so that I have actually cared enough to pay closer attention to it.

Might be a part of it.

[JohnBrown1917]

People have it to good so they come up with all kinds of bullshit to satisfy their hollow existence. 12 hours of field ploughing per day would cure it very efficiently.

Instead people are working 12 hour jobs.

[smityx]

I blame "The September that Never Ended"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[unbound]

It seems like ever since 2014 politics and society has gotten more and more batshit insane. What has happened? Economic inequality making us more stressed and angry? It the narcissism that is infecting both sides of the political spectrum. I notice some people who were non political becoming political extremists overnight back in 2016.

It started long before 2014.

In the US, this modern trend started as part of the party switchover in the 60s and 70s (Republicans were more like Democrats of today and vice versa) all because Democrats started supporting civil rights (more accurately, northern Democrats did while the southern Democrats known as Dixiecrats did not). Those Dixiecrats moved over to the Republican party and things were in flux.

Around that time, the Republicans were not doing as well, so they planned on ways to change the conversation. Roger Ailes wrote a memo to that effect in 1970 to create a GOP TV...a precursor to his actual creation of Fox News in the 90s. https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...world-fox-news

Even before Fox News (aka GOP TV) was created, the conversations got more and more political when I was younger in the 80s with propaganda becoming more mainstream as a result of the massive increases in corporate lobbying that was also planned in the 70s. https://www.theatlantic.com/business...ocracy/390822/

When Fox News hit, a very credulous audience was there waiting for it. Fox News reports exactly what they want to hear that change is bad, "others" are to blame (others being any group of a different race, religion, sex, etc that can be used to absolve themselves of all blame), and that they should be fearful of everything. This grew with the internet and a massive increase in RW sites who have convinced idiots that they now know the secret truth that regular people are blind to (you see this nonsense every day even on this site, but if you go to RW sites, it really is insane).

There are outlets on the left that are just as insane, but they are substantially smaller than what exists on the right. The problem is that as the right continues to move further and further to the extreme right (heck, there are at least 3 known white supremacists running as Republicans this year now), the center looks to be to the extreme left to them anymore...especially since most extremists think the world is black and white (basically, if you aren't with me, then you must be against me).

Unfortunately, our mainstream media outlets aren't mostly left leaning, they are merely incompetent and lazy. They are all too happy to report on any controversy and rarely dig deep enough to go much beyond "he said, she said". This makes the world appear even more broken.

[Mafic]

Here is my counter opinion.

Society is still the same. People just know about it now because people post on social media now.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Social media + the internet = every average Joe with an opinion becomes convinced that they actually matter.

[igualitarist]

Imo, it started to go off the rails much sooner, in 2002/2003.

[zenkai]

It seems like ever since 2014 politics and society has gotten more and more batshit insane. What has happened? Economic inequality making us more stressed and angry? It the narcissism that is infecting both sides of the political spectrum. I notice some people who were non political becoming political extremists overnight back in 2016.

Eh, the few crazy assholes get media spotlight attention and we are force fed it not only in news but every media platform so people start thinking it's the norm. In reality the people around you are not that insane, well except maybe in CA and FL.

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

This quote is taken out of context. She was saying if you see any of this call it out as it is

[Theodarzna]

It seems like ever since 2014 politics and society has gotten more and more batshit insane. What has happened? Economic inequality making us more stressed and angry? It the narcissism that is infecting both sides of the political spectrum. I notice some people who were non political becoming political extremists overnight back in 2016.

Jocks and Cheerleaders.... right?

[Independent voter]

2014 is around the time when everyone got on the internet, the loony left met the righteous right for the first time and both sides thought the other was crazy.

Now we are have a loud, boisterous conversation.

[derpkitteh]

yes, this kind of person is the problem.

get rid of them, and everything goes back to normal.