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I wrote this three years ago on reddit but no one read it. Ironic, I know. It'll happen again, seeing as how this is a two day old story, but posterity matters. I'm really late to the party (and people probably won't see this), but I'm going to earnestly give you what I think is going on and why we desperately need to breathe new life into our idea of what civility is in this country or be ready to pull the plug and start anew. This is going to be meandering--just a warning. The Weimar Republic was established in Germany after the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I. As most people know, this government fell within two decades into the hands of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. What fewer people know is the cultural context before and during the Weimar Republic that made that ascension (of one revolutionary or reactionary stripe or another) generally inevitable. From "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J. Evans > These milieux, with their party newspapers, clubs and societies, were unusually rigid and homogeneous. Already before 1914 this had resulted in a politicization of whole areas of life that in other societies were much freer from ideological identifications. Thus, if an ordinary German wanted to join a male voice choir, for instance, he had to choose in some areas between a Catholic and a Protestant choir, in others between a socialist and a nationalist choir; the same went for gymnastics clubs, cycling clubs, football clubs and the rest. A member of the Social Democratic Party before the war could have virtually his entire life encompassed by the party and its organizations: he could read a Social Democratic newspaper, go to a Social Democratic pub or bar, belong to a Social Democratic trade union, borrow books from the Social Democratic library, go to Social Democratic festivals and plays, marry a woman who belonged to the Social Democratic women’s organization, enrol his children in the Social Democratic youth movement and be buried with the aid of a Social Democratic burial fund. Similar things could be said of the Centre Party (which could rely on the mass organization of supporters in the People’s Association for a Catholic Germany, the Catholic Trade Union movement, and Catholic leisure clubs and societies of all kinds) but also to a certain extent of other parties too. These sharply defined political-cultural milieux did not disappear with the advent of the Weimar Republic. But the emergence of commercialized mass leisure, the ‘boulevard press’, based on sensation and scandal, the cinema, cheap novels, dance-halls and leisure activities of all kinds began in the 1920s to provide alternative sources of identification for the young, who were thus less tightly bound to political parties than their elders were (emphasis mine). The older generation of political activists were too closely tied to their particular political ideology to find compromise and co-operation with other politicians and their parties very easy. Now what Richard Evans doesn't consider salient enough to mention is that those same means and methods of creating mass leisure also allowed mass polarization. Those means actually rewarded the development of echo chambers amongst the elder political activists as well, furthering the break between activists. Why argue or listen to your opponents when you can just find people that think exactly like you already? Why spread your opponents message for them when you can just blanket them out with your propaganda? Then you had the normalization of information cascade[^1] and social proof[^2] as behavioral strategies for survival. The rate and breadth for which these political groups demanded new tokens of loyalty became so rapid and outside your scope that it just made sense, that even if you felt, thought, or acted differently in private, to publicly go along with things with which you disagreed. With this kind of chilling effect[^3] on public dissent, eventually even silence becomes synonymous with complicity with the enemy. In the end, you can't be the last person to clap for Stalin[^4]. What assisted these elements in rising was the further degeneration of political discourse and a corresponding rise in political violence as a legitimate means of expression: Ibid. > The First World War legitimized violence to a degree that not even Bismarck’s wars of unification in 1864-70 had been able to do. Before the war, Germans even of widely differing and bitterly opposed political beliefs had been able to discuss their differences without resorting to violence. After 1918, however, things were entirely different. The changed climate could already be observed in parliamentary proceedings. These had remained relatively decorous under the Empire, but after 1918 they degenerated all too often into unseemly shouting matches, with each side showing open contempt for the other, and the chair unable to keep order. Far worse, however, was the situation on the streets, where all sides organized armed squads of thugs, fights and brawls became commonplace, and beatings-up and assassinations were widely used. Those who carried out these acts of violence were not only former soldiers, but also included men in their late teens and twenties who had been too young to fight in the war themselves and for whom civil violence became a way of legitimizing themselves in the face of the powerful myth of the older generation of front-soldiers (emphasis mine). |
The Internet, like the advent of pulp publishing, the cinema, and radio before it in the Weimar Republic, has enabled a fantastic amount of stimulus and incoherent messaging that can be directly, without any kind of curation, accessed directly by younger people. This easily leads to a state of "hyperreality"[^5] if you're a leftist neo-Marxist or Bezmenov's "demoralization"[^6] if you're a rightist neo-Fascist. The particular emphasis differs between the two concepts, but the fundamental point of both is that an individual can no longer determine what is actually real and what isn't (i.e. societal gaslighting[^7], which creates a sense of alienation and impotence that creates learned helplessness[^8]). This trend has really been ascendant for the last twenty years or so in youth culture.
This entire package overall creates a sense of cultural rootlessness amongst youth segments across all demographics. Note the simultaneous rise of "normie" and "cishet privilege" as insults towards majority culture in the background Internet cultural milleux by fundamentally opposing groups. The mass capitalization of culture has destroyed any sense of historical or cultural context for young people and the overall cultural and economic downturn since 2008 has also prevented their own integration into society in meaningful ways as individuals. They are plagued by impostor syndrome[^9] if they're inside groups and are plagued by fear of missing out[^10] if they're not. This psychological inferiority applies in every realm of their lives. They are buffeted from everywhere with contradictory messages. They are told by every form of media that they are inferior to an ever-shifting ideal. They are told that to exist socially as functional adults, they need to meet now-impossible cultural expectations--they need to be attractive, have lots of money, own houses, have high paying jobs, have great experiences all the time, etc.
Fight Club was really prescient in nailing that emerging pathos:
> Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.