Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
by Jonathan Haidt
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Excellent article on dangers to healthy social structure and communication values ... and what could help save them.
Instead of approaching topics with intelligence and open-mindedness, people have to settle for tweets; insulting tweets, threatening tweets, attacking tweets, bragging tweets, lying tweets, bullying tweets, everything but truthful tweets. Achilles heel couldn't have been weaker. Lol
Haidt’s story is why I don’t read The Atlantic: too thin a story told in too many words.
Additionally, in this particular article, the writer repeats the phrase that Babel is not a story of Tribalism but one of factionalism, and then concentrates on Tribalism.
Thought these were interesting reads too about Haidt.
From [en.wikipedia.org]
Haidt describes how he began to study political psychology in order to help the Democratic Party win more elections, and argues that each of the major political groups—conservatives, progressives, and libertarians—have valuable insights and that truth and good policy emerge from the contest of ideas.[41] Since 2012, Haidt has referred to himself as a political centrist.[42][43][44]
Haidt is involved with several efforts to help bridge the political divide and reduce political polarization in the United States. In 2007, he founded the website CivilPolitics.org, a clearinghouse for research on political civility.[45] He serves on the advisory boards of Represent.Us., a non-partisan anti-corruption organization; the Acumen Fund, which invests in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty; and braverangels.org, a bipartisan group working to reduce political polarization.
In 2019, Haidt argued that there is a "very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy."
Notable from the article: "in a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry."