Comment by fennecbutt
2 days ago
Apathetic voters who'll still vote for a terrible party just because they hate the same people the politicians say they do?
MIB put it so succinctly, large groups of humans are exceedingly dumb. It's almost like our individual intelligence drops, perhaps we evolved those effects from tribalism so that organising larger groups was more effective. And perhaps that effect is broken now that we organise in much larger groups than we ever evolved for.
"A bad plan now is better than a good plan later."
People have evolved to unify behind a strong (and aggressive) leader because historically the biggest threat to one's tribe (and therefore genes) were other tribes. You might not be in the right but it doesn't matter to evolution, what matters is that you kill the people trying to kill you, regardless of who started is.
This primitive drive is why every time the going gets tough, people elect charismatic and abusive leaders - because their lizard brain wants to fight an external enemy and abusers are good at giving people that enemy (Jews for Hitler, immigrants and gays and anybody who is slightly different for Trump, ...).
---
The issue is that for most of our evolution, such a leader could units hundreds, maybe thousands of people and if a tribe behaved aggressively and unjustly towards its neighbors, those neighbors would units against it and "keep it in check" (which is a euphemism for fighting and killing them).
But these days you have 3 superpowers, 2 of which are dictatorships and the 3rd is on track to become one. There is nobody to keep them in check.
Oh and the abusers have nukes now.