Self evidently, it is largely a lie, and for non-conformists it is the most dangerous system possible.
But weak, fearful people are the ideal audience for Socialist rants, and spending 8 hours a day watching violent TV is more or less a perfect means of building those people.
[Edit; obviously, conservatives appeal to fear too. They appeal to the fear of other nations, of war, and of economic disaster. The type of fear I am referring to here, though, is fear of your neighbors, and of “Life” writ large. Anomalous, unanchored, atmospheric anxiety is what I am talking about. And it does seem to have been shown that conservatives have less mental problems than Leftists, which makes sense for a number of reasons.]
Actually, on that note, I saw a crowd today listening to someone talk in a park. I saw that most of them were wearing masks, and inferred it was left wing something or other, probably race related. I may have been wrong–it would have been good to validate my hypothesis–but I didn’t feel like it.
But why are masks seemingly a bigger thing with Democrats? It is virtue signalling, yes, but I think much of it is simply cowardice. They are vastly more afraid of their own shadows, figuratively and literally.
This is a large problem. One of the obvious solutions, to my mind, is to mainstream the considerable evidence that we survive our physical deaths, and that mind is non-local in ways which can be studied as “psi”, broadly understood.
There can be little doubt for anyone who has done the work to understand the state of the science that the Cartesian-Newtonian Paradigm, as I saw Stan Grof call it in a talk I watched last night, really needs to give way to something suitable for current understandings of the best evidence.
In my view, many political religions depend ultimately on philosophical pessimism. For all people certain that their own death is eternal, the temptation to live on through “society” can be nearly overwhelming.
All of these are old ideas, much trodden over in the 20th century. If God is dead, everything is permitted, we hear. If we are just machines made out of meat, then as individuals we are not perfectable, we hear. No individual morality is possible. This is why socialism, as a sustainable perfection of the machine, comes to assume such mythical dominance among atheists.
It does seem obvious, though, that all this violence in media cannot but make people into emotional imbeciles. And one sees this, of course. One sees childishness, patronizing narcissism, glib superficiality, and even cultishness in the political and other domains.
When these kids take over, absent some sea change of some sort, nothing good can be expected, in my view. But of course changes do happen. Miracles do occur. My own work is largely oriented around this observation.