Finding Resilience in the Face of Disinformation

Media
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Dr. Keith and Corey explore multiple strategies to help us maintain our mental and emotional well-being as our informational terrains become increasingly disrupted and distorted by a constant flood of disinformation.

We begin by taking a look at a research briefing that identifies the three primary cognitive biases that cause people to believe and share misinformation:

1. Repetition and the illusory truth effect

“We are all prone to believing the things we hear repeated. Ever since a 1945 study found that individuals who had previously heard a war rumour were more likely to believe it, psychologists have identified a positive association between repeated exposure to a statement, and its acceptance as truth. This occurs when the audience lacks the information needed to refute a claim – but remarkably, repetition leads to belief even when we do know better.”

2. Fluency and the credibility of information that “looks” right

“We are also prone to believing a story that “looks” right. Whenever we process a new piece of information, whether we believe it or not is a matter of active deliberation, but also a matter of an unconscious, barely perceptible preference our brains have for things which are easy to process. Psychologists refer to this as “processing fluency”. It is a bias we should all be aware of.”

3. Motivated reasoning

“Comprehension of evidence is not necessarily the main factor governing belief in misinformation: sometimes we simply believe things that suit our existing world views. Psychologists call this motivated reasoning. The attitudes we hold already influence our way of accepting new evidence, even when we should and do know otherwise.”

The briefing also presents research findings of who is more vulnerable to believe false data, who is more likely to forward false data, and how false data is challenged (or not) on social media. Some of findings were:

  • Older (60 plus) and less educated people find it harder to discern fact from fiction.
  • Older people find it harder to remember sources of information.
  • Everyone is more distracted on social media and less likely to remember sources.
  • All people tend to share info with higher emotional charge. People share positive material more than negative, but negative stands out.
  • Anything less than a 4 to 1 positive to negative ratio registers more due to human negativity bias.
  • Very few people challenge info they believe is false on social media.
  • Young people more likely to share emotionally charged content they know is wrong.
  • Very few people challenge info they believe is wrong on social media.

Considering just how rampant misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda have become in our broken media landscapes, it is more important than ever for us to come to terms with these cognitive biases in our own lives and better understand how they are constantly shaping and re-shaping our own thoughts and beliefs. This conversation will help you develop the epistemic antibodies you need in order to keep your head above the dark and choppy waters of the social media age.

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Bit of historical insight into susceptibility to existential fear, uncertainty and doubt misinformation.

https://unherd.com/2021/12/who-cares-about-the-end-of-the-world/

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Wowza.

Doing so well looking at the epistemology of disinformation - motivated reasoning, evolutionary basis for negative information bias…

Then the us vs they divisive definition that our society and culture are based upon “extractive capitalism”. You’re either with us - growth people - or not with us - extractive capitalist looking to dominate humanity. That’s a fairly simplistic worldview that would seemingly check a vast multitude of the very disinformation boxes listed above. I’m assuming this “extractive capitalism” term is a respin out of Das Kapital.

Is the plumber that you call when your sewage backs up simply a cog in the “dominator hierarchy” if she doesn’t have time to chat with me about about my ponderings on the search for meaning in Nihilist world? Does she become an actual “dominator” when she hires 3 plumbers, 3 plumbers apprentices, an office manager, and a part time accountant while still not having time to chat about the search for meaning in a meaningless world?
Is the guru looking to “extract” a bit of capital in exchange for his enlightenment completely free from the “dominator hierarchy”?

Or are both simply striving to create value each in their own way by helping real humans living real lives in a very real visceral world in exchange for a bit of “extracted capital”?

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The phrase “extractive capitalism” doesn’t mean “all capitalism is bad”. It is not, as you assume, “a respin out of Das Kapital”. The plumbers you mention are not “extracting” value, they are generating value based on a fair exchange of services for capital.

Extractive economics are when wealth and resources are stripped from the earth and from communities with no intent to recycle or replenish those resources. It’s where value moves aggressively from the many to the few, and seldom moves back to the many. It also includes the common paradigm of “privatize the gains, socialize the losses”, where “losses” can include everything from financial losses (e.g. bank bailouts) to underpaying workers (full time Walmart employees requiring government services such as food stamps to make ends meet) to ecological destruction (e.g. dumping chemicals into a river and polluting the land in order to maximize profit).

It is the economic paradigm that creates selection pressures where short term gains are paramount, and long-term sustainability is an afterthought. I would also argue that extractive economies are ones that focus entirely on people’s “extrinsic value” (our value is determined by the value we create for other people) and completely ignore “intrinsic value” (our implicit value as human beings) which has led to the decline of the private sphere of hearth, home, and family, and the alarming rise of anxiety, depression, and suicide rates (particularly for men), and which makes entire human beings just as disposable as the products they are consuming.

It is the capitalism of fragility, and creates fragile systems in its wake in the name of maximizing profit (see, for example, our supply chain crises that often stem from the elimination of wasteful warehouses and moving instead to “delivery on demand” systems that are incredibly vulnerable to disruption and system shock when any number of equally fragile supporting systems are themselves disrupted).

It is a form of capitalism that emerged before we began to understand that resources are finite, that ecosystems can be fragile (in the short term anyway), and before we fully grasped the fact that human beings are intrinsically worthy of basic rights, dignities, and protections (e.g. child labor laws, 40 hour work weeks, minimum wage, the rise of unions that created a stable middle class in the mid 20th century, etc. — all of which were efforts to regulate the worst excesses of extractive capitalism).

Here’s a discussion you might enjoy.

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I was looking at Witt’s statement (paraphrased) - Growth hierarchy or Extractive Capitalist/dominator categories. Perhaps it was a bit tersely worded to state you’re either growth hierarchy .or. dominator/extractive capitalist hierarchy. Based on your post Corey, perhaps Witt is using a somewhat different definition for Extractive Capitalism.

We’re all genius’ when it comes to hindsight - the Neanderthals should have abolished slavery 75,000 years ago, unions should have negotiated the 40 hour work week in 257 AD, we should have seen the economic impacts of Amazon, Walmart and Chinese imports, we should have understood the societal angst and soulless meaningless caused by Nihilist ideologies, we should have foreseen the horrific human misery that Marx/Engels would bestow upon the world in collaboration with the political elite that used their ideology to dominate 100M’s of people. But perhaps it’s also a way to set context for others in order to feed them disinformation.

Are we perhaps slipping into Intellectual Bypassing of the positives (that 4:1 ratio?) that we are making in order to further propagate the “negative sells” world view? The very Nihilist “life is empty and meaningless” so now we have generations feeling “empty and meaningless” searching in obscure crags and crevices for “meaning in life”? It’s interesting to causality, correlation or simply coincidence between the promotion of social science’ish solutions and the very same industries “extractive capitalism” of the existential issues.

If we consider Resilience in the Face of Disinformation, should we not perhaps survey those Billions of people that DO have meaning in their lives for perhaps clues as to what’s different for them? What they do that frees them from Existential Terror of Crisis Du Jour? How they seemingly live lives experiencing peace relatively free from the Angst of Nihilism?

Interestingly if the “negative sells” 4 times more effectively than “positive”, no wonder “it’s a fucked up world” vs “it’s a great life, let’s get to work” is the mantra from so many media outlets.

Thanks for the link on Rushkoff. His historical mapping looks very good, but perhaps has the more negative focus (4:1) that we should be aware of. I’ll try to find his dissertation to see if he compares his critique of Western Civilization throughout history with alternative options at the same time in history.

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One thing few people do that somewhat mitigates against these three is having to negotiate perspectives from a variety of “truths”.
“Ghettoization” of perspective is among the top 10 threats to humanity, and completely avoidable and self inflicted.
Its beyond two sides. Two sides will always be a narrative you are being fed and thus always suspect. If a person thinks in terms of two sides - frankly they are assimilated to a narrative.
Because reality is never never never just two sides. Reality is complex and the more an issue is analysed the more absurd it is to categorize whole populations along “liberal / conservative” lines.
The most effective “vaccination” I have discovered against this kind of thought is to move every 5 to 10 years, preferably internationally. Vacation travel is still just a bubble where the tourist can bring an their existing biases with them unchallenged.
Actually living next door to vastly different cultures is a really effective way to realize the narrative fed by the media is absurd.
What does a toothless grandmother in the carpathians know or care about MAGA? I’m sure you’d be surprised because nothing about such a person adheres to a media narrative. The more exposure you have to such people in a genuine, connected way - the easier it is to see the false narrative in us media.

Reporting to you from the southernmost laundromat in the USA. (Not my normal environs)

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“Life is meaningless”
Is a necessary stage, or step. It isn’t the end truth.

It’s a necessary bridge across the gap from the passive “life has an assigned meaning and we are passive receptors of a meaning assigned to us.”
To:
“I am / we are responsible for creating and perpetuating meaning within ourselves”
We cannot really “own” or fully accept meaning unless we ourselves are part of that meaning and actively participate in it.

That’s intellectual meaning.
There is also another aspect of meaning that is completely non rational, and that is the meaning or value of a thing for merely existing. A bee and a flower have meaning besides and above and beyond their functional utility values. The entire universe could very well serve no ultimate utilitarian or practical value - just the miraculous fact of its existence has “meaning”

But to arrive at either of these what I would call “Greater meanings” it’s often necessary to abandon earlier meanings assigned by, well … frankly more primitive civilizations.

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Two Part Post
If we take the approach to life as a pupil investigating with vigorous rigor what others have looked at as to answer “the meaning of life” and perhaps more importantly the living practices, rituals, codes, frameworks to personally develop a “meaning to life”, will we each come to the same conclusion? Is it possible for others to incorporate within their “meaning paradigm” that which has existed previously and reject newfangled, as an example, a neuvo meta Nihilistism in favor of “primitive” customs, rituals, structures and practices?

Back to Negative vs Positive evolutionary bias.
Given that negativity is an “easy sell” - i.e. takes 4x as much positivity to have the impact of 1x the negativity could it be that the “anti virus” program we should all be running on ourselves and communities simply to be positive, find positive people, avoid negativity, avoid negative thinkers, seek positive ideology, avoid negative ideology?

Interesting data on correlation of Leftism and mental well being.
“The results confirm the general pattern from before, namely that there is a strongly elevated risk for mental illness among the extreme liberals (+150%), a small increase among the liberals and slightly liberals (+29 to 32%), and somewhat lower rates among conservatives and extreme conservatives (-17 to 24%). Breaking the pattern, slightly conservatives had a marginally increased rate (+6%). A variant of this analysis was also carried out by including the happiness metrics reverse-coded. This produced materially the same pattern, but was weaker since the happiness items had a weaker relationship with political ideology than the mental illness variables.” (linked here)
Lots of statistical data included, but one thing that stands out. The greatest disparity in Happy vs Unhappy is between Far Left women. Perhaps the Far Left is looking to emulate the religious structures of those Far Right women that are markedly more well off.
Or are those on the Right just simply Pollyannas obliviously to the existential calamity of the world we live in?

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Finding Resilience in the Face of Disinformation

The Year’s Ironies

At the end of this second terrible year, we are left only with ironies.

Vaccinations are a must for soldiers and federal employees, but no barrier to entry for 2 million illegal aliens (is breaking the law a way to avoid the mandate?).
If you are vaxxed, you are safe; but if your antibody level is even higher from natural immunity, you are not?

If you get COVID, you are on your own, given the government has no idea what affordable pill you should swallow or what protocol you should follow.

Social distancing and masks are vital—unless you go out on the street protesting in concert with BLM or are a California official dining at the French Laundry, or a liberal politician getting your hair done.

Those Americans in 2020 who claimed their president was all too real, know now they voted in a president who is all too false.

Those Americans who thought up every conceivable legal and illegal way of forcing the hated Trump out of office are racking their brains in vain to use those talents to find just one way of easing out their beloved Joe Biden.

Those Americans, who love the free cash for staying home, fear that the money they got might help to explain why it is now less valuable.

Those Americans, who claimed moral superiority for their masks and three shots—and still got COVID—cannot decide whether they were lied to by Donald Trump, lied to by Joe Biden—or simply lied to themselves.

Those Americans who praised defunding the police and excused looting, arson, and violence are pondering whether it is better to renounce their idiocy, or to stay quiet and take one more carjacking, one more assault, or one more break-in—for the cause.

Those Americans who applauded the disreputable efforts of Michael Avenatti, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, Adam Schiff, Christopher Steele, and Alexander Vindman to destroy Trump at all costs, got all they wanted—and thereby have all but destroyed the progressive cause, and likely made Donald Trump all the more powerful, the more so they sought to ruin him.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/02/the-truths-we-dared-not-speak-in-2021/

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It’s possible, but why when the downside is so great - that these structures tend to limit growth beyond a certain stage?

It really does link in to the topic: do people establish meaning intrinsically or extrinsically? Those who more readily accept an exterior source for their meaning will also less likely challenge that source when it ceases to make sense. Or worse and also very common, when the group starts to manipulate or exploit the individual and builds the fallacy that the organization is the “meaning”.

No - again this is looking externally to a solution. The antivirus program people should be running is having worth and value and meaning within themselves and any “negativity” will be mostly irrelevant, as will the inevitable cult aspect of spiritual organizations that try to present themselves as the best or only option.

Kind of irrelevant to the topic, but I understand you have to get in some anti-left propaganda into every one of your posts.

By the way - did you actually read the article you linked to?
Are you aware that he is basing his premise on the writings of Ted Kaczynski? You know, the Unabomber?
Are you now thinking “Gee, that Ted Kaczynski guy, he’s starting to make a lot of sense …”
image
The only real actual “study” (being very generous in calling it a study) in the page you linked relied on SELF REPORTING of mental illness - not actual diagnosed mental illness. This is really bottom of the barrel stuff - even moreso because it’s not even hosted on a legit academic archive, but some kind of random “archive” with a .vn (vietnam) domain. You might as well ask “How intelligent do you think you are?”, and I predict you will come to the “conclusion” that conspiracy theorists are the smartest 1% people on the planet. Self-reporting isn’t even worth academic review: “bollocks” is completely appropriate for this level of “study”.

So ironically enough - more disinformation again from @FermentedAgave
And we see clearly it’s cause - just being lazy and not actually reading past an article’s headlines. In this episode of “In the Face of Disinformation” @FermentedAgave follows a madman because, well - he said something against leftists and it kinda sounds good, so why bother actually reading it. Let’s just make some bombs and start mailing them to leftists, right?

The second post you go off topic (or don’t explain how it links to the topic) so I’m not even going to address that.
Skimming it, it appears to be your typical unrelated 2 minutes of delusion that you can’t post in your other thread because you already hit your three post in a row max there.

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I agree completely that looking solely for extrinsic sources of validation or meaning is fraught with the dangers for blind ideological followings. I don’t think you’re really arguing that there is nothing external of any value, of any meaning, of wisdom - but are saying “you have to look within also”. What it seems you are arguing is to perhaps weight much more heavily “internal” practices, introspection.

My assumption is that most folks here on IL are each consciously (at varying levels of consciousness) exploring both external and internal realms. That’s what we love about IT and AQAL.

What I’m saying is that you don’t need to convince me that we all need to do our own internal cleaning up and development. We’re all actually doing this or we wouldn’t be here.

I think where we diverge is that I do think there is much to be gained from external practices, structures, dogmas, hierarchies to facilitate our personal growth and development. And also our growth and development as communities, nations, species.

Just as many might espouse Buddhist practices for their internal benefits, can you in good faith claim that the fruits of Western Civilization are “in spite of” Christianity, Democracy, Individual Rights?
Just do an honest Eastern vs Western cultural comparison and ask yourself where you would want, as an example, an average intelligence, lesbian daughter to grow up and live?

I’ve made no claims to the absolute veracity of the article I posted, just that there is a marked difference reported between Far Left and Far Right outlooks on life, mental well being, or perhaps sense of meaningfulness. Just as I “self report” that we’ve got it really good. How would you “self report” on the world that are in right now?

This forum is a primary example, at least for myself. Get to hear from highly intelligent, wise, intellectual pupils of life looking to help the world clean up, develop, grow to create a better place for all humankind.

I probably wasn’t very articulate in tying this back to Witt and DeVos’ discussion on “negative is taken up 4X more readily than positive”, which was somewhat fundamental to their disinformation concerns. Simplistically we are hardwired to perceive and weight more heavily the “dangers” we hear about, as opposed to the “good news” that is around us.

What I do think is well worth consideration by those that espouse highly Progressive, perhaps even Radical changes to ways of life is to really look at just how negatively they view the world in which we reside when by every measure we are leading the best lives humans have ever experienced in the history of humankind.

Peace be with you!

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Introspection is the wrong word. There’s two divergent ideas simultaneously. One, that there is “meaning” regardless of if you exist or not. I imagine a Far Side cartoon of two Gods standing next to each other, and our God shows the other His Universe that He created, and the other God says “Yeah, well, that’s very nice - but what does it actually DO?” Does the Universe need a functional purpose to have value, or “meaning” - then on the micro level do you need a functional purpose to have value or “meaning”? No - all this talk about “the meaning of life” is just people wanting some kind of meaning, and one will do just as well as another because the greater meaning - “God’s” value of the Universe is beyond any flimsy meaning our egos want to create in our brief 2,000 years since Jesus lived.

In this grand scale of things, you or I have no more extrinsic “meaning” than bacteria, unless we create it from within ourselves. Without bacteria, 99.99% of life on Earth would cease to exist, while if Humans became extinct the rest of the life forms would prosper.

It’s mostly Ego and Fear that causes humans to embrace the self limiting belief that they are the center of some kind of “plan” for the entire Universe. It’s actually call it a delusion.

We probably disagree what these “fruits” are, and we also probably disagree on the method by which we get fruits. I see winter as a necessary prelude to spring, so there can be no fruit without a bit of frost (or at least a rainy season before the sunny). I see the global “summer” of humanity as pre-ancient times when the great Megaliths were built (evidence of complex and advanced cultures) and the Great World Wars of the past 300 years (one of them lasted 100 years) as the “Winter”. I’d call 2020 Humanity’s Winter Solistice - where it’s still a cultural Winter but at least the sun is starting to draw nearer instead of further away.

Christianity was an important stage in Humanity, but not the ultimate truth about everything for all time. Democracy and individual rights are also important developments - but not sacred cows, either.

Actually having an adult daughter who at one time came out as Gay, the Untied States has no appeal to her. I guess it depends on how you define “East” and “West” in that case. She prefers to live pretty far to the East (but slightly West of the actual “East”).
But the question completely ignores the fact that the West completely destroyed the deep cultures of the East through Colonialism.
If I had to live 1,000 lifetimes from 15,000 bce to 2,000 ce, I’d definitely prefer the East. Things only got bad in the East since Colonialism, so only the last 500 years was worse in the East. Even if we just took the age of Christianity, life was more pleasant in the East for 3/4 of that period then for another few hundred years it was a tie. Life in the “West” was Hell until very recently. Imagine living in a city where people just toss buckets of piss and shit out their windows. Public sanitation is a very recent development in the West.

I mean, you probably should check out what you repeat before you repeat something.
The only difference the research shows is that the Far Left is more self critical while the Far Right is more overconfident.

You keep saying “every”, but completely ignore the fact that you are not considering “every”, but just a narrow view. Yes, today is the best time to have “stuff” and “comfort”. So yes, if you are an unthinking consumer with no actual desire for anything else besides consumption and comfort, then yes - now is the best of times. If, however, you prefer silk to rayon or honey over artificial sugar - silk and honey have existed for thousands of years and I actually don’t like rayon nor artificial sweeteners. I could list hundreds of other examples, but hopefully you see my point.

By the way, I just spent a week in a tent and while I did have various electronic devices, I preferred to just listen to the coqui frogs. I feel much more balanced and healthy than using any media device or other invention could ever come close to.

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Not your bullfrog ‘ribbit’ for sure!

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I don’t see how a focus on physical meaning or existence is much more than a basic fear of death. I don’t know how this would rank for most people but for myself I don’t concern myself with it. It doesn’t interest me. I think traditional faith practices developed over centuries first and foremost look to provide mental well being and freedom from anxiety. Both in individual and communal quadrants.
Personally I like to investigate ideologies and dogmas and practices as a pupil of understanding, but don’t have the temerity to dismiss these traditional practices that work for Billions to substitute my own ideas. Have we each here done the work comparable in depth and longevity to the Buddhist monk, Catholic priest, practicing Pastor, Imam, Rabbi, life long Shaman much less have the combination of intelligence, emotional intelligence, hard work and luck of right work to produce these traditions, prayers, religions, practices that the truly brilliant saint like people that have come before have built for us.

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I don’t know about you, but I have. Maybe not the most saintly or most enlightened at the highest levels, no. But as for your average pastor or Buddhist Monk, Pastor or New Age Urban Shaman … yeah … they are mostly just normal people who are also looking for answers.

There’s that straw man again. Show me where I dismissed Buddhism, Shamanism, Judaism etc.
When in fact you are the one completely dismissive of “The East” compared to the West. So in addition to straw man it’s also that projection, lol.

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Some do, while also many create dysfunctional mental states in their practitioners. An entire 1,000 years worth of wars were fought over Religion - from the Crusades to the War on Terror. I’m not saying like Bill Maher that ALL religion is bad - but it is very much “let the buyer beware” and always have your eyes open for deception and manipulation.

Here’s a fun interview on the subject of WWI as a religious crusade:

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Not dismissive but simply weighing real world results for cultures based on Eastern vs Western religions and governing systems. I know you see things essentially diametrically opposite.
To give Buddhism its due, it has been a great religion for internal development in really harsh living conditions. I’m not sure the Chinese or Filipinos or Maylas or Koreans or Indians can vouch for Buddhism being an avant gard foundation for their experiences and cultural developments.

I’m quite well aware of the rise and decline of the Ottoman Empire and its influence due to historical family impacts.
To me these power dynamics should be looked at first and foremost from an economic and territory lens, then secondarily through the pop culture go-to lenses of religion and race. To lead with religion as the causation for wars is a bit naive in my view.
How did your wife’s ancestors fare under the Ottomans? Was it a drop off in quality of life to gravitate back into the European sphere?

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@raybennett Here is an articulation of the “Life is Good” (so why fuck everything up) crowd. You might consider this crowd “brain washed” or “unaware”, but when you look at “real world results for real humans” what we have stacks up quite nicely historically and contemporaneously with the Far Left movements.

Excerpt:
Over the past several decades, the progressive Left has successfully fulfilled Antonio Gramsci’s famed admonition of a “long march through the institutions”. In almost every Western country, its adherents now dominate the education system, media, cultural institutions, and financial behemoths.

But what do they have to show for it? Not as much as they might have expected. Rather than a Bolshevik-style assumption of power, there’s every chance this institutional triumph will not produce an enduring political victory, let alone substantially change public opinion.

Even before Biden’s botched Build Back Better initiative, American progressives faced opposition to their wildly impractical claims about achieving “zero Covid” and “zero emissions”, confronting “systemic racism” by defunding the police, regulating speech, and redefining two biological sexes into a multiplicity.

And to support your desire for “awakening from spoon feeding” of the masses, this does seem to be the case.

Meanwhile, the mass media, particularly its legacy outlets, constitute another progressive bastion losing credibility. One recent survey found that barely one in three Americans trusts the media, including a majority of Democrats, while only 15% of Americans have confidence in newspapers. Part of this surely stems from their bias: although there remain some powerful conservative voices, notably on talk radio and Newscorp properties, the vast majority of journalistic power lies with the Left. It’s the same story with social media, which increasingly dominates news access and is also widely distrusted.

https://unherd.com/2022/01/is-this-the-end-of-progressive-america/

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Buddhism is only the most recent pathway developed in a spiritual tradition that spans back 15,000 years - when Europeans were living in caves. When the Greeks came to India they were astounded, like a bunch of country bumpkins. All the Greeks knew, they learned from the East (and didn’t even cite their sources, lol). Vast wealthy Eastern Civilizations existed thousands of years and our historians date their megaliths like the pyramids to at least 3,000 bce, but there is lots of evidence some may be much older. Again when Marco Polo travelled to China he was a primitive European. It was only through mass genocide that the West was able to rise above the East.

When we take the vast history of civilization in the East - this brief 200 year history of the United States is just a flash in the pan. Compare 20,000 years versus 200 years. Yes, the West has gotten more comfortable in the most recent 50 years. Before that it was kind of a toss up.
Ahhh, but the future - China is going to kick the USA’s butt economically and militarily.

Back to the topic of disinformation - our entire understanding of History from History classes was one vast disinformation campaign. You only really get into an accurate depiction of History at the Senior University level (usually 400 level courses). Most universities don’t even have a “World History” course - they only offer “Western Civilizations” to freshmen. So the overwhelming majority of so-called “educated” people are completely uneducated in all history other than Ancient Greece to United States. It’s not really your fault that you just don’t know about history other than Greece to USA - but it is the state of affairs that even educated Americans have gaping holes in their historical knowledge and this misinforms their opinions.
Then there is Polynesia, lol. For all the time up until Captain Cook brought syphilis and smallpox, Polynesia was a far far far better place to live than anywhere in Europe or the United States. There isn’t even any comparison. The Native Polynesians worked a couple hours a week to meet their needs and lived very comfortable lifestyles. Their foods did not require complex preparations as European bread does. They literally just picked bread off the tree. It’s called “breadfruit”, lol. They had a vast Seafaring civilization and criss-crossed the seas.
Then Europeans came and cut down all the breadfruit trees and spread diseases that incubated for hundreds of years in their filthy, hellish European cities. So again, a vast portion of the planet was vastly better off and much more comfortable than Europe for thousands of years, and only since 1950 has the west made it into a modern City.

It’s only by completely ignoring vast periods of history that we are able to swallow the disinformation that we are the “best” or most “advanced” civilization.
The disinformation also keeps people from seeing how really messed up the modern world actually is - because they just don’t have anything to compare it to. An ancient Egyptian actually had time to volunteer a large part of his life to build megaliths. What portion of Americans are so financially secure that they can just go off for a few month to volunteer their time to build a monument?

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In fact I find your constant far left straw man discussions boring and tiring.
I’ve gone through them at least a dozen times with you and it’s just more of the same.

Disinformation through logical fallacy.

Biden blah blah blah.

Cut and paste someone else’s opinion without even reading it first.

Just skimming what you posted … it’s just trash. In 1984 Orwell called it duck speak.
Quack quack quack Biden.
Quack quack quack Bolsheviks.
Quack quack quack Liberal progressives.

Completely missing from your thought process is that Ben Franklin, George Washington, John Adams and most the New England founding fathers were flaming Liberals. The United States was founded on Liberal principles and our first army was LGBT friendly. Again, the holes in your education are not your fault, just an effect of disinformation.
So if you want to talk about Liberalism sowing the seeds of our destruction, you have to go back to the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

Just for fun (not an academic article by any means, but does question the modern conservative Bonafides of our founding fathers):