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Comment by gambler | Hacker News Reader

You know, I am beginning to see that all that talk about mass psychosis caused by social isolation due to Covid and lockdowns was onto something. It explains a lot of what is happening right now. People are hyper-focused on only one thing and pay zero attention to long-term and larger-context consequences of their actions. And proud of it.

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Not only that, but I’m observing lately that Western culture is becoming increasingly juvenile and generally lacking in wisdom, apparently by deliberately forgetting the past.

In the past you'd get your information via your city newspaper, maybe the NYT/WSJ or another national newspaper if you strived to be "well informed" and then your choice of the NBC/ABC/CBS nightly news because cable didn't exist yet. The filters in front of the bulk of the population were much stronger then.

Because social media gave literal juveniles power in numbers whereas in real life their opinions would have been largely ignored. On social media, you don't know if you're talking to a high-schooler, a bot, or a state sponsored troll. Yet their opinion is essentially weighted the same as a PhD scholar.

I have no idea what all of the talk about mass psychosis is even trying to say and the video about it that went viral feels a bit...manufactured?

I’m sure there’s a term for it, but it’s saying something that could be true without providing data or any accountability kind of like a horoscope.

“People seem much more X than they did Y years ago.”

The power of suggestion makes you start noticing all the examples of X in the last Y years.

That's the exact feeling I got from it. It says nothing and can be broadly applied to anything with philosopher quotes sprinkled in.

The comments also seemed less than genuine and the source of the material is anonymous.

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