Conversation

Replying to

and

Pretty amazing to see in the case of one of my in-laws: He left Poland as a clueless neoliberal type for a summer job. Came back several months later as a born-again fundamentalist. Completely bizarre. Completely normal, too.

Replying to

and

Yeah. These things evolve like religions. I guess that's just humans.

Replying to

and

Now he also believes vaccines cause autism (no small irony, given he's like 90% likely to have undiagnosed Asperger), and that you need to supplement vitamin C in quantities that would make Hitler's ol' "inject methamphetamine directly into the spinal cord" doctor blush.

Replying to

and

Sounds like a good test-case to see if there's a way of talking people down from this stuff. For some anti-vax types it's a whole lifestyle - Steiner fans, homeopaths - but these recent converts must surely be curable - there's less of a reason for them to believe.

Replying to

and

If anything, I think he's the exact evidence of how this usually functions: it's a fad. An extremely dangerous fad. But a fad. People are just very poor at judging which fads are worth investing in.

Replying to

and

It's interesting to me because it doesn't seem to push that many of the usual buttons for beliefs like this; if we look at the range of human emotional needs a fully-evolved religion (or even some less well-defined lifestyles) provides, this stuff is pretty weak.

Replying to

and

It's too narrow a topic for people who don't have a religious/pseudo-religious background, so it has limited community benefits. It doesn't provide comfort, but also doesn't provide a regular dose of fear. The risk is that other conspiracy theory type stuff is the next step.

Replying to

and

Yes, which mostly tells you how weak our institutions and social fabric have become - most people are barely even duct taped together. This is what people inside establishment bubbles can't understand. It's a jungle out here. Nobody actually believes in anything anymore.

Replying to

and

Well, Bannon and people like that understand it.

Replying to

and

I was saying recently to a neighbour that any act of collaboration or community feels like rebellion because society has been so completely and actively fractured. We're going to start doing shared meals and I think it'll feel way more subversive than it should.

Replying to

and

Yes. The neoliberals neoliberalized social relations by decades of sustained divide & conquer politics, and never stopped to think that they might not be able to control, even meaningfully affect, the outcome. Now they whine about how "people are so stupid" on Twitter. Morons.

11:21 AM · Mar 4, 2019Twitter Web Client

Replying to

and

Atomizing social relations, in and of itself, is something that should only foster social bonds. It produces much-closer-to-spec social units. But when you layer an economics of exploitation on top of it...

Replying to

and

Yeah, quite. People don't have the headspace or the time to talk to their neighbours, let alone organise. The people who do can end up being a gradually narrowing elite of relatively time-rich and/or financially rich people.