That has been exploited by those seeking power and money, but that exploitation is so transparent that they can't be unaware. They accede to it because their top priority has become the fight itself and defeating their opponents -- even though those opponents are fellow citizens. That allows them to buy into even the most obvious deceptions, because it affirms for them the deeper truth.
I've expressed this in nonpartisan terms, but I'm willing to bet that everybody knows who I'm talking about, and they will object. I'm not going to engage -- the whole point here is that I don't believe engaging will achieve anything. And it also means that their attempts to convince me will similarly be ignored -- either because I'm right, or precisely because I'm wrong. The irony bugs the hell out of me.
My take is not so optimistic. Intelligence is roughly normally distributed, and the fat middle, 100±1 stddev or so, simply does not know better, and does not have the requisite brainpower to think past social conditioning, whether from friends or propaganda. Particularly when the average person has a life to live and won't spend much or any of that time verifying anything. At the very least the capable among us are better able to prioritize which facts to take time to verify, while the average person probably doesn't verify anything rigorously at all.
I don't honestly think it has anything to do with being "capable", I think it has to do with having the time and resources to learn how or even why they should want to in the first place. Most people don't. Most people have to work to eat and if they're not too exhausted to do anything than passively absorb entertainment when they get home that just means their boss isn't getting their full value out of them.
edit: I actually think this is a serious point, because it speaks to the difficulty of short-cutting your way to a correct opinion by looking at the character and motives of people participating in the debate.
For any political or moral position with a non-trivial number of supporters, I could find examples of proponents being cruel, irrational, intellectually inconsistent, plainly dishonest, and so on. Not necessarily an equal number of examples -- often one side of an issue really does attract worse/dumber people -- but always enough to give you a pretty dim view of that group, and by extension that side of the debate.
And unfortunately I think this plays a big role in how we actually make up our minds. It's unsurprising, and probably necessary, that we cluster issues together and apply some social heuristics rather than independently investigating every topic in depth. 'Do the people who support this set of policies seem smart and benevolent?' is a reasonable heuristic when applied to a fair sample. But unfortunately it's also a really easy heuristic to hack, simply by cherry-picking the best/worst examples. This can be done deliberately by others, lazily by ourselves, randomly by circumstance, or blindly by social media algorithms, but in each case the effect is similar.
(Of course, the extra complication is that this heuristic can easily fail even when applied perfectly. Maybe a position is attractive to many people for bad reasons, while also being attractive to open-minded experts because the facts ultimately back it up. The experts will usually be outnumbered, so a random sample will show the majority of people with the correct opinion holding it for bad reasons.)
An awful lot of evil has been done by people who firmly believed they were doing the right thing. I'd even go further and suggest that most evil has been done by people who thought they were in the right.
Consider also that the notions of what is right and wrong have changed considerably over time.
Someone else might enjoy that politician's suffering if they are brought up on charges, but it's definitely not a necessary feeling if it's a just outcome.
So I wouldn't argue that "enjoying someone else's suffering" is sufficient to guarantee you're on the wrong side, but I would say that it's not necessary - and therefore, if any just outcome can be found without feeling satisfaction in the person's suffering, then we should individually seek to be free of enjoying the suffering of others. And encourage other people of that as well. It's simply not necessary. And I would argue that if enjoying the suffering of others becomes a larger part of your motivation, you are definitely more susceptible to be in favor of actions that are otherwise unsupported or wrong.
So, new heuristic - if the chief reason for visiting some justice on someone is because it would make them suffer, be suspicious and don't join in unless you can find an independent justification for that justice.
I'll just go ahead and be less coy about it: they were so far off base when it came to same-sex marriage that it casts doubt on every bit of reasoning they claim. The arguments were absurd. They lost the fight and none of the evils they claimed came to pass.
It's not the most important issue, but it's one in which they were so obviously and overwhelmingly wrong that I think it justifies my claim that they may be similarly off-base on many other issues. I am, of course, wrong about many things myself, but nothing so egregiously and demonstrably incorrect as that. There are other issues that aren't as massively a slam-dunk, but I've seen enough egregious propaganda repeatedly refuted that it's clear to me that they're not listening.
That said, no, I can't be certain that I'm not just the victim of propaganda. That's why I put it as I did: if I'm wrong, then I'm very wrong, and it will be impossible to convince me otherwise.
I’m gay, and to me the animal farming industry is obviously more wrong than banning same-sex marriage. Yet almost everyone in both of the political tribes eats meat.
My values fall in line with the left in most areas, so I generally associate and agree with left-wingers. This means I get exposed to a lot of left-wing perspectives and media, so to me, it appears that the Republicans are constantly being evil. But then again, everyone on both sides is eating meat, so how different can they possibly be?
Hopefully a similar thing will happen with respect to our treatment of animals: as humane alternatives become easier and more appealing, there will be less incentive to avoid thinking about the suffering inflicted, and this will kick-start the social process whereby factory farming eventually becomes obviously indefensible to most people.
I hope you're right about animals. It's a case where I know I'm being inconsistent. But at least I'm aware of it and trying to do better, rather than twist the rationale why my existing behavior (and misbehavior) must be correct.
I don't need people to do the right things for the right reasons. But I need them to be open to reasons.
As human beings, we're predisposed to think socially; when we see an issue, we look for the individual person who is the proximal cause of that issue. We have a much harder time seeing when the issue was caused by a broader system. That's why we're constantly frustrated and thwarted by issues where it seems the problem will never go away: we dealt with the person who was at fault, why has the issue reappeared? It must be hopeless, there must be nothing to do but accept that every bad person will be replaced with another bad person. But why aren't we asking what mechanism it is that keeps replacing these "bad" people with new ones? We're stricken with learned helplessness because we can't see the structure of the system or realize the fact that we have the ability to manipulate and change it, because the problem doesn't lie in any one person but in the shape of society itself.
You sure about that?
Christian bakers being hounded for years because they don't want to make a cake which artistically expresses support for gay marriage. It's worth looking at the masterpiece cakeshop case, because you realize that they've been targeted for legal harassment in a premeditated way, not simply because someone couldn't find cake.
You can look up some of the statistics on political and religious discrimination in academia and some job fields, and try to think how that would look to you if you were a conservative or a Christian.you understand that you would have to live your life in a kind of hiding, while listening to people flagrantly insult your beliefs on a regular basis to guffaws and applause.
I'd also point to how we now see little boys performing sexual dances in front of groups of adult men or offering money. Stripping, blowing kisses, and so on.
Trans kids. Hormone replacement for 12 year olds.
Then there's education. Children being taught that women are men, men or women, and so on. Your children.
If you love all these things then you wouldn't think anything was wrong, however you have to acknowledge that they're not the same as gay marriage but if gay marriage had not happened they would not have happened either. Ultimately it comes down to what do you think a healthy society should look like. If your personal values take sexual freedom has the highest value, then yes you want this direction. Others believe that society should mold individuals into healthier forms as a way of helping them and strengthening the group. These are moral intuitions, axiomatic.
EDIT: I think from this comment it looks like you just failed the ideological turing test (google it); you haven't been consuming the other side's propaganda/opinions straight from source, you've been consuming your side's propaganda/opinions about the other side. So fundamentally you don't know what the other side is thinking. (This is common; it's been demonstrated empirically that conservatives can predict leftists' response to political questions better than the other way around, probably because leftists control education and media so rightists are forced to consume their messages in volume, but not the other way around.)
Honestly, I have no idea. Reading the first two paragraphs my first thought was that it's scary that I have no idea what side of the political divide this might more fully describe. Then I came to this sentence and realized that you did have a side you were thinking of.
At some point it becomes really obvious what is happening. Anybody who lived through the rise and fall of Slashdot has already seen it. However, before it becomes really obvious, is it actually clear what's going on? Does one really understand one is being manipulated? When one jumps into a conversation and pushes an important point, is it obvious that the point originated at this very nerdy news site? Are we all clear on how we formed our ideas, who influenced us and where we got the supporting evidence to convince ourselves that we've got it right? Or do we rely on our gut feelings and participate in the echo chamber?
I don't believe anybody really understands the extent to which they are manipulated. That's the nature of manipulation.
It feels cyclic, increased internet usage leading to mental health problems leading to you caring less about others and isolation with negative thoughts being magnified online (who are curators?) and other normal users being driven towards it through social conformation and increased internet usage is probably caused by failures of parenting, school, society and environment. Lack of mentorship and models. Some of it could be attributed to disconnection and huge disparity in problems people face - inequality, literate supremacy, global impression and visibility in what you can get.
Social media might be perhaps incentivising some of the behaviors but it's not the root cause of it perhaps?
Maybe the notion of a good healthy society is finally crumbling due to visibility?
Being forced to admit that world is unfair most of your day is not very healthy imo and its effects are stronger the more big of a disparity there is.
I think education could help there with compulsory classes on how to deal with negative thoughts, differences and other problematic behaviors before you need to drip into antidepressants and years of therapy.
Oh not to mention the statistics trend, the one most 'rationalists' fall for. I am tired of extrapolation and over fitting in everything these days. It hides problems so so well.
1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=scha...
I'd argue the solution towards a better society is figuring out how to eliminate trust all together, rather than trying to figure out how to make it more widespread. The issue isn't, "lack of trust", its that different groups of people place arbitrary trust in sources of authority that are perceived by them to be legitimate. The answer is to promote universal skepticism and reliance on the Socratic Method in all things. Trust nothing, verify everything and value logical consistency above all things.