Is news distorting reality and tearing society apart?

I don’t see it happening. What is truth? A source I find unbiased is incredibly biased to someone who disagrees with me. I believe my truth and they believe theirs. How can we find middle ground in this situation? I just don’t see a way especially when the spin is so much more captivating for people; we crave the craziness.

It's a great question and this isn't a great answer but something either happened or it didn't. So the question isn't for me "what is truth" but what is "proof" of something happening or not happening.

What is proof? Unless you see something with your own eyes how do you know what you’re seeing online is real? It’s a wild time.

> Is there a way to recover a shared ground of truth? Or are stories too deeply ingrained in how humans process information?

the older i get, the more i read of history, and the worse things become, the more sympathetic i am to those who argue that armed revolution is the only catalyst for dramatic change.

and i hate that.

i don't want to live in a violent country. i don't want my neighbors to live in fear because of the color of their skin or their nationality or their accent. i don't want to have a reasonable quality of life tied to whatever employer will give me health care. and i don't want to hurt another person - anyone.

but i just don't see a peaceful de-escalation happening; i don't see any kind of de-escalation happening until enough people decide the profit motive is the wrong motive in all situations and that we need to drastically change the way we interact with the world and one another.

:(

How do you square that with the objectively terrible results of all the times in the last 100 ish years that ppl justified the use of violence to eradicate the concept of profit or self-interest? This time it will be different?

Anyone acting in good faith can find plenty to dislike about markets and prices and systems built on top of them.

But the problem is that anyone acting in good faith can also find plenty to dislike about collective systems built no allowance for markets or pricing.

I hear a lot of people talking about the former, a very rarely do I hear any collectivist or socialists speak openly and honestly about the latter.

Markets and prices are not perfect, but they are useful. Many other concepts are useful too.

As I age, the transformation that I notice in my thinking is simply that I no longer believe there is some perfect socioeconomic system, waiting for us out there. There’s only us, and a bunch of imperfect concepts and ideas. It’s up to us to put them together in ways that work, but I don’t think there’s some perfect arrangement that will solve all our problems for all time.

> How do you square that with the objectively terrible results of all the times in the last 100

I can't hear you over the sounds of China's rise to number one, my real life lived experience of the last 30 years of stagnation in the US, and the complete lack of political willpower in US leadership to put any effort into actually doing their jobs.

Is that same China that murdered tens of millions of its own during the Great (sic) Leap Forward or a different one?

The same China in which anyone who can, tries to get a passport from a western Liberal democracy?

There’s plenty of sclerosis to complain about in the West, and there’s no question that China has done well in the last few decades. But the original poster was implying that he was coming around to the idea that using violence to get rid of markets was justified. An example involving China, in my opinion, would have to go the other way and conclude that their violent revolution was a bloody failure until they re-embraced markets.

No one said get rid of markets, just tune markets where profit motive is not what it is now.

...

It's the same PRC that killed the landlords and then a bunch of peasants to force transition from subsistent agrarian society to an industrialized one, just post GLF, i.e. IMF noted that PRC in 70s (shortly after GLF) was significantly more industrialized than developing peers who started around same condition.

It's the same China where rich Chinese want LIO passport BECAUSE they know LIO democracies are so corrupt and captured by money that their black money is safe. Which is more indictment of western sclerosis, because they don't believe west can do the hard things to fix current economic model.

Whether you think current model is broken / needs fixing is up for debate, but fixing hard problems on short timelines, i.e. drastic change may require breaking eggs aka violence. That's the objective lesson when one examines past 100 years into illustrative history. Violence (revolution, wars, state collapse) break entrenched/sclerosis systems that build up on century cycles (rough heuristic).

It's the same pattern that China and other older countries (including western ones that are now LIO), who has gone through these cycles have learned and that young US will likely eventually also learn. You break systems (and markets) with violence and then rebuild it, hopefully better than you started. But sometimes not. But at some point the only feasible fix, is pitchforks.

I'm a lot more concerned about the current Great Leap Backwards than some random thing Mao did in the 60s that literally nobody is talking about doing again.

I dunno man, feels like there are a lot of ppl on left and right today flirting with those ideas.

ultimately, i agree with your final point. and i would be a real boastful idiot to claim that one predefined, prescribed economic system is going to bring about utopia; i just fundamentally do not want to engage with ideologies that promote profit or self-interest (when that self-interest becomes harmful to others) because to me, those are thought-terminating ideologies.

i don't have any answers. i'm just sad about the world all the time. and maybe i get worked up too easily but we are definitely in the midst of a very weird and terrible inflection point in american history (let alone the rest of the world).

Armed revolution has definitely been the catalyst for dramatic change in the past.

Can we agree to change without collective suffering?

I hope so.

You've got the crux already:

> Stories are being weaponised by populists who thrive on fear and capitalists who benefit from monetising it. The best storytellers are winning attention and winning power and keeping their power by telling even better stories.

It is increasingly costly to reach an audience (especially one of the size that would be required to have a "shared ground") not only in the sense of cash money, but also the attention cost of convincing that audience that those "better stories" (perhaps more shocking, outraging, etc.) they've been told might not be actually true.

News is becoming yet another industry that rewards the first mover -- write that first shocking headline, and all the other outlets have to work 10 or 100 times as hard to correct it later.