Comment by wat10000
3 days ago
I think it’s the news.
Our monkey brains can’t comprehend a world with billions of people in it. Stuff on the news is rare pretty much by definition. It gets rarer the broader your news gets. National news has stuff that’s much rarer than local, and world news is rarer still.
But your monkey brain doesn’t get that. It sees a story about somebody getting murdered and it does, holy shit somebody got murdered, this is bad! It sees these stories daily and it concludes that the world is incredibly dangerous.
This isn’t new, but the volume is way up. Decades ago, we might get twenty minutes of world news each night on the TV. Now we’re constantly bombarded with it.
People in developed countries are safer than pretty much any human has ever been before, and they feel more threatened than anyone before as well, because they’re exposed to a deluge of tragedies. The fact that the denominator on those tragedies is eight billion just doesn’t compute.
Oh, and leaded gasoline probably doesn’t help. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. The last cohort with substantial childhood exposure won’t retire for another two decades or so.
The news intentionally pushes stories to make people afraid, but I think that's only part of the problem. There's a ton of well-earned distrust in the institutions which are supposed to protect us. Our "justice" system is corrupt from top to bottom. Agencies that should be working to protect the public are instead helping corporations exploit them. Even our representatives don't actually represent us or our interests and vast numbers of people already don't see any point to voting in a clearly rigged system while the rest are gerrymandered and disenfranchised by it.
For most of American's history each generation was better off than the previous one, but that's no longer the case. People's standard of living is in decline. They are forced to watch their children struggle in ways they never had to. The things that made people feel safe and stable and part of a community like homes and jobs with pension plans are out of reach for most people. More and more people are sliding into poverty.
All of this leads to a situation where people increasingly feel that they have to look out for themselves and that makes people fearful and distrustful.