Take a step back and think about the last 50 or 60 years. When I was born, the United States had an existential enemy: communism. More specifically, the Soviet Union and Red China. We'd gone through communist witch hunts conducted by Senators and other political figures. The John Birch society found communists around every corner. We practiced nuclear bomb drills in school, as if hiding under our desks would somehow save us from nuclear weapons. We went to war in Vietnam out of fear that, if the communists in North Vietnam prevailed, the other countries in that part of the world would fall like dominoes.Some Schmo wrote: ↑Wed Dec 16, 2020 1:46 pmGood point. I suppose revenge addiction goes a long way toward explaining Fox News' success, too.
When the Soviet Union imploded, the communist threat got a great deal less scary. There was brief talk of using a "peace dividend" make badly needed improvements in US infrastructure, health care systems, etc. But our brains were addicted to having existential enemies, and we immediately began to cast about to find them. There were many candidates, but the genius of one Rush Limbaugh was to consolidate them into a single enemy: liberals. He parlayed almost every fear that Americans had: black folk, immigrants, terrorists, muslims, and conglomerated them all into a single enemy to hate: liberals. Liberals were stealing white people's jobs to unqualified black people, liberals were encouraging lying women to accuse good, honest, innocent men of harassment and rape, liberals are taking your money and giving it to lazy welfare queens.
He developed an audience that fed on fear, anger and resentment. And he made bank doing it. And others wanted a piece of the action, which resulted in a kind of demonization arms race. Liberals morphed into socialists and then morphed again into communists. The average Fox view couldn't define communism to save his life -- but he damn sure knows that democrats are whatever communists are and they are an existential threat to America.
And it's profitable. Very profitable. That's how we end up with OANN and Newsmax TV. They depend on feeding their viewers ever higher dosages of fear, hatred, and resentment. The claims become increasingly extreme and the conspiracy theories more elaborate. It's an addiction and the media are the drug pushers.
And social media amplifies the effect with it's intentional dopamine producing mechanisms. Post some outrages claim against Biden and feel hit after hit after hit after hit of dopamine as people give you likes or hearts or retweets. Satisfy your addiction to vengeance by crushing anyone who disagrees.
That's not to say that this happens only on the right. CNN, for example, certainly cashed in on fear and outrage connected with Trump. But there was no liberal counterpart to right wing hate radio. Left wing talk radio never took off, perhaps there was simply no audience for being pumped up every day with reports of some conservative somewhere doing something outrageous and threatening. So, I use the right because there is a track record going back decades of media addicting a large audience to fear, anger and resentment.
So how do you help people recover from an addiction about which they are in extreme denial?
No idea.