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In reply to the discussion: Can you put down your pitchfork long enough to discuss the root causes of the anti-vax problem? [View all]Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)already noted this. I was going to point specifically to statistics, logic, and a real understanding of the scientific process, but it is true that that is a subset of our greater addiction to fantasy and rejection of reality as a nation.
I don't want to get labeled a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder how much of that is related to the explosive growth of television and the internet over the last half century, allowing actual 'fantasy worlds' to provide the input our brains process for a far greater percentage of the day. Whether we're playing 'Halo' or 'Lord of the Rings Online' or watching 'Mike and Molly' or 'The Young and the Restless' or 'Jersey Shore' or televised sports, we're being surrounded with either outright 'unreality' or simply a twisted and overdramatized reality, that teaches us to overreact to stimuli, to interact with others with more emotion and less logic. Obviously I'm not saying we're being taught to hack our 'foes' to death with swords or mow them down with assault weapons (except in the cases of people who are already mentally deranged, who just are suggested the method to use when enacting their existing violent fantasies), but we are taught to 'trash talk', to behave egotistically rather than empathetically, to escalate situations, rather than simply try and figure them out. That competition is better than cooperation. That emotionality rather than rationality is something to be embraced, even idolized.
And why might we be addicted to fantasy? Because the world sucks in a lot of ways, and it's a lot of work to face the suckiness head on and actually work to fix it. Far easier to simply 'hide' away watching fantasy people who manage to live happy lives despite the suck around them, or to play games that we know are 'winnable', and thus feed our sense that we're 'accomplishing' something by 'leveling up' or getting better equipment or armour, rather than actually accomplishing something in reality, which takes far longer, is far messier, and never so clear cut.