A lot of what I read online tells me that most people treat far-right (and other) extremism as an unnatural phenomenon. But the more I think about it I am starting to think it's a very natural phenomenon.
Does it strike you that what we're currently experiencing is a systematic loss of faith in humanity and its institutions? Does that just mean these people were born with, or derived these feelings from nothing? Or are they just like the rest of us who ended up "on the short end of the stick" in life?
I think what could follow from this reasoning is that extremism in a society could be used as a metric for us all, collectively, to understand whether or not we're "doing a good enough job" for our fellow citizens and humanity in general?
jfengel•6mo ago
We are, without doubt, "experiencing is a systematic loss of faith in humanity and its institutions". I believe that this loss is manufactured, at least with respect to the right wing: people have been repeatedly told that they have grievances, and that they're all the fault of minority groups.
It doesn't mean that they don't also have genuine grievances. It just means that, if I'm correct, then the things that trigger the extremism metric are not the grievances that actually matter.
I could be wrong about that; maybe it's just a coincidence that there is massive right-wing media infrastructure that has been repeatedly called out for falsehoods. It could be that they are, perhaps despite themselves, documenting genuine failures.
But overall, no, I don't think that extremism makes a good metric. It's a purely one-sided metric; it cannot take into context anybody else's grievances or the actual magnitude of theirs. It's merely a squeaky wheel getting grease.
mobileturdfctry•6mo ago
I do agree that people with real mental health issues, who only want to see death and destruction of the people and world around them might think it would be fun, but I'd argue that those people wouldn't be very effective at achieving that goal.