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Comment by 1827162 | Hacker News Reader

And in order to compete with the other channels, news started becoming more and more sensationalist. Those channels contributed to the moral panics behind "Stranger Danger" and "Satanic Ritual Abuse", which resulted in parents becoming overprotective towards their children, stunting their development. When these children grew up into adults, they carried this "safetyist" worldview with them, where freedom is traded for security. And we know from history where that path leads to in the end, if it's not stopped somehow.

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> And in order to compete with the other channels, news started becoming more and more sensationalist.

I fear the same pattern repeating with Patreon-powered journalism and Substack.

It is definitely happening. I used to like people like Taibbi and Greenwald but I feel that they have cranked up the outrage over the last years to the point that I can't listen to them anymore.

You're getting down voted, but you're not wrong.

Another factor in parents over protecting kids came from John Walsh. Now, let me preface by saying no parent should endure what his family had to. But he nearly single-handedly caused what we see today where parents get in trouble for letting their kids walk to school or to the park. People today think everyone is a pedo or a child killer because that's what they were fed in the 80s and 90s.

It's a powerful combination of safetyism and concentration in urban and suburban areas that has pushed the American political compass strongly towards collectivistic priorities this generation. Basically a strong "europeisation" in metropolitan America.

Perhaps extortionate real estate prices and telework will put some counterbalance to it, but I don't expect this trend to buckle during my lifetime.

What has this got to do with collectivism? People can collectively decide to do whatever they want. Germany collectively decide to have risky playgrounds for kids. Sweden collectively decided not to lock down hard for covid. It sounds to me like America could do with collectively standing up against these channels and rejecting the rubbish they are peddling.

I don't know that I'd call Germany collectivist. Under your examples by the US having national laws and regulation, we are somehow collectivist, which is not true. It's a trait of society and government.

Collectivist societies are unique in that they punish individuality. The government decides something and everyone must comply or face extra-judicial and potentially judicial consequences.

Individualistic societies often celebrate individuality. It's not marked by the absence of collective decisions, but that there's tolerance to dissent, or even that dissent is given weight and merit philosophically.

I'd summarize this as, collectivist societies are a proxy for government cohesion; it looks like people have power, but they don't. Individualistic societies retain power in both large numbers of people, but also individuals. The government is at competition with it's power to groups of people, which theoretically plays a role in keeping it in check.

That is not why I meant by collectivism. Deciding things collectively just means you have organs of government.

By collectivistic priorities I simply meant that given trade offs between individual and collective orders of priority, the collective takes priority, often at the expense of individual rights.

America has traditionally had classical liberal ideals of individualism, as laid out by Locke, Rousseau and Franklin chiefly, and later others. What we've seen in the last few decades is a stronger alignment with continental European mainstream thought and politics. Perhaps because cities and demographics have pushed things in that direction. But I think safetyism is also a strong component.

I have seen those "risky" playgrounds in Germany - they aren't that risky at all?

Sure, you could get a splinter from the wood if its not maintained, or have a fall and get scraped up, but the risks are low, the benefits (learning to not be a fucking muppet, learning to cope with falls) are high.

The definition of collectivism you are using is incorrect.

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