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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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Right. The question is less how do we move past trump and more how do we contend with half our population seriously lacking critical thinking skills? We have a crisis on our hands and it isn’t (just) fascism, it’s an inability to correctly process the information of the world around us.
In many ways it is the core crisis that causes most of our other ones, including lack of a reaction to climate change, lack of accountability for the wealthy, lack of proper social safety nets,... because divide and conquer tactics by bad actors work a lot better if you only need to divide those who do possess critical thinking skills and those who don't from each other.
"So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult."
George Orwell, 1984
Honestly, I think it's more than half of our population that lacks critical thinking skills. Basically, there are two big camps, and both sides are screaming about how terrible the other candidate is without acknowledging how stupid it is that we only have two viable candidates to pick from for the most powerful office in the country, if not the world.
I personally think that Trump is way worse than Harris, but that misses the point entirely. I strongly dislike both Harris and Trump, yet voting for anyone else is "throwing my vote away." If we had a different voting system that took multiple preferences into account (ranked choice, STAR, approval, etc), we could maybe have viable third party candidates to pick from. But no, we only get two realistic candidates, and it seems the quiet majority is completely okay with that.
If we had a better system, people who strongly dislike Harris could vote for someone else first, with Trump as their backup, and people who strongly dislike Trump could vote for someone else first, with Harris as their backup. And maybe, just maybe, a halfway decent candidate could be selected instead of picking between two bad options.
I think more than half of the country agrees that Trump is terrible, they just don't agree that he's worse than Harris.