[justsocrateasin]

People going to flat earth and believing in flat earth are two separate things. As OP said -

> People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.

Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.

[gjsman-1000]

> Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.

That's what your gut reaction may tell you; but I don't believe this is reality. The refusal to accept widely-accepted science is often rooted in distrust of the official narrative.

It's like saying people commit violence, just because they like violence, or must be stupid. Most of the time there's an underlying cause.

[cycomanic]

This is the narrative that has been spun, that somehow Fox News (the largest TV channel) is not mainstream, that a candidate like Trump who's been rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous since he was born, is anti-establishment, while a former waitress winning a seat through a grass root campaign with very little funding is.

That we should mistrust scientists because they are biased and instead trust think tanks financed by tabacco and oil corporations as well as billionaires...

That government agencies like the EPA are to be mistrusted because everything government is bad, but that the military and police should be supported unconditionally even if they execute innocents in the streets.

[consteval]

> often rooted in distrust of the official narrative

I disagree from what I've seen.

I hear a lot of crazy conspiracies from Trump followers where I live. Including from my family.

On one hand they, they have a distrust for the establishment. But on the other they're dangerously close to fascists. I mean, Trump is a monarch to them. They don't trust the DOJ. Or the house. Or the senate. Or any of the agencies. But they trust Trump. If he says they're eating cats and dogs, then that's what they're doing.

It's very odd to be both in this "anti-establishment" headspace but also basically endorse and ask for a fascist government where one King makes all the rules. And you just trust him and have absolute loyalty.

That is to say, I don't think "distrust the gov" is the end of the discussion. There's more to it.

[krapp]

One of the elephants in the room, I think, is the religious dimension to the divide. Trumpists don't mistrust government per se, they mistrust secular government, but tend to approve of government that espouses and enforces traditional Christian ideology. They mistrust secular science because they believe it contradicts the Bible. Their opposition to LGBTQ people is rooted in a binary view of sex and gender based on Christian doctrine.

Even the "rural vs urban divide" people talk about is really a divide between Christianity, as expressed in "traditional values" and secularism. "Left" and "right" is "atheism" versus "faith," respectively. Communism and socialism are hated primarily because they're seen as anti-religion, and this extends to a hatred of leftism, liberalism, progressivism, etc as all similarly demonic in nature.

Aspects of this fundamental struggle between theology and secularism go all the way back to Reagan, at least, and I even believe back to the founding fathers. If you look deep enough into any of the systemic issues in American culture, you'll probably find religion somewhere at the heart of them.

The apparent contradiction between being anti-establishment but pro Trump (to the point of neo-fascism) makes sense in this context. Trumpists consider the establishment to be Satanic, and they believe Trump will replace it with a Christian theocratic order. And even a cursory glance at the Bible will tell you that the Kingdom of God is not even remotely a democracy.

[cogman10]

I like to look into wacky conspiracies and where they come from.

Quite frankly, the most common reason people believe in a flat earth is because of biblical literalism. There are a few passages in the bible (which, if you ever watch a flat earth video, those almost always come out) which mention things like the earth having corners or god rolling it up like a scroll. Those verses are used as the grounding point for why the earth must be flat and all other evidence to the contrary is a lie.

This is also, consequentially, the origin of moon landing denialism. Mormons used to believe that the moon was literally a part of heaven. As a result, it'd be impossible for god to let someone fly a spaceship there. Pretty much exactly the same process happened "It couldn't have happened because our holy texts say the moon is the terrestrial kingdom... therefor it must be a hoax".

[danaris]

Yes: and in this case, one of the big underlying causes is one of our two political parties—in particular its presidential candidate—aggressively spreading disinformation specifically in order to win him the presidency. (Just as they did the last two times he was trying.)

Another is....a systemic lack of education in critical thinking and how to tell mis- and disinformation from truth.

There is a decrease in people's trust in institutions, but my read on it is that it is an effect of these other phenomena, rather than a cause.

I know that HN tends to frown on partisan politics, but it's really not possible (or at least, not intellectually honest) to talk about the rise in misinformation, distrust, and conspiracy theories without talking about Trump and his role in it.

[gjsman-1000]

Oh whatever; presidents have been lying for decades now.

I remember a president whose error on "weapons of mass destruction" left my uncle nearly suicidal and killed countless Americans for nothing.

I remember a president whose DOJ wiretapped the Associated Press in 2012.

I remember a president who allowed his own Director of National Intelligence to lie to Congress about the NSA's activities before Snowden.

I can go on.

[tzs]

Are you suggesting that quality and quantity of lies does not matter?

[danaris]

Sure, politicians lie. Presidents are definitionally politicians, so they lie sometimes too.

But Donald Trump's lies are orders of magnitude more frequent and worse than any previous president, and frankly anyone trying to dispute that at this point is clearly using motivated reasoning.

[mindcrime]

I know that HN tends to frown on partisan politics, but it's really not possible (or at least, not intellectually honest) to talk about the rise in misinformation, distrust, and conspiracy theories without talking about Trump and his role in it.

I don't know how to quantify the extent to which I despise Donald Trump. Suffice it to say that it's "off the scale". And yet, while I agree with you in general, to some extent I think Trumpism is the symptom and not the disease itself. I think there's something deeper and older at play, something that enables Trump and his brand of bullshit to prosper. I don't pretend to understand exactly what it is.. maybe it's as simple as saying "education". Maybe not.

What I have been saying, which is admittedly a bit hand-wavy at the moment, is that "our culture is sick". We don't cherish, promote, and prioritize the right things IMO. We reward the wrong behaviors and - I believe - are somehow incentivizing the whole "rejection of science/math/logic/reason and embrace of ignorance" thing.

[danaris]

I think you are right, but only to a certain extent.

Yes, Trump brought out something that was already there, lying dormant. But without Trump, it would mostly have stayed dormant.

Trump's primary victory in 2016 was a massive fluke, primarily (from what I saw) enabled by a combination of the horribly fractured GOP field, with the party establishment unable to rally behind a single candidate until it was already too late, a bunch of people who thought it was funny and voted for Trump for the lulz, and a large number of people who were frustrated by the past few years. That latter group I think came in two basic flavors: the ones who were frustrated because we had a black president, and the ones who were frustrated because the GOP Congress was stopping everything he tried to do (but who didn't fully grasp that this was entirely the GOP's fault). I genuinely believe that had the circumstances been just a little bit different in any number of ways, Trump would never even have made it past the first primary.

Once he was in the position of being a major party presidential candidate, it amplified his voice and that voice gave permission for all the bigots and fascists in America and abroad to show themselves and join their power together.

That said, I think there is a sickness in our culture, and I think its current prominence can largely be traced to Reagan, through several other intermediaries.

What we don't cherish, promote, and prioritize is kindness and compassion for our fellow human beings—all of them.

[mindcrime]

Yep. I think we are generally in agreement. I just wish I knew a simple answer - or any answer - for fixing the "whatever it is" that's infecting our culture/society these days.

[danaris]

Unfortunately, I'm very sure that there is no one simple answer—it's so many interlocking things: education spending, voting rights, voting reform (eg, ranked-choice), more spending on basic needs...

On the bright side, this also means that improvement in any of them also helps, even if only a little bit, to pull the whole tangle further up.