They were self-sufficient in the sense that there was no one coming to help in case of emergency. That doesn't mean they ever felt secure. Entire families regularly died for one or more of dozens of causes: starvation, freezing weather, tornadoes, human sickness, livestock sickness, crop failure, drought, dangerous animals, Indian attack, crime, etc. Some of them might have pretended at a "control over their lives", but few modern Americans would trade places with them.

I mentioned it as contrast to the parent comment who simply concluded people are incapable of rational thought, and meant to suggest there are mediating influences.

I'm not and I'm willing to give it a chance. I'm just not seeing a strong correlation.

What I do see people doing when they lack control is to attempt to gain control. Put together a group, grab some of that sweet power through mass. The more ambitious ones fight their way up the power structure. Special bonus points if you can take over an existing seat of power.

One way in which people gain (the feeling of) control is to imagine the world differently (superstition, conspiracy, religion) in a way that makes them virtuous or special and others not (i.e. essentially Nietzsche's idea of ressentiment). If you haven't the power to take part in a real struggle, this is not so surprising to me.

Perhaps the temptation is to choose philosophies that have the appearance of power. Sticking pins in a voodoo doll of your boss, Mr. Scrooge for example.

Some acquaintances of mine did that at their job once and it worked a charm. The boss was permanently off on sick leave within a month. Maybe there's something to it.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

These people ended up being Qanon's bread and butter. From the outside in they seem in control of their lives, but maybe it's all a ruse.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote extensively on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3iKBxJ9vQ0

Only a small percentage of that generation were into the specific sort of counterculture Thompson was steeped in, but the whole cultural zeitgeist of the generation was wrapped up in various forms of either political or mystical idealism or a heavily marketed idea that scientific or technological progress would deliver giant miracles in short order. These people expected some kind of big, glorious future and they feel like it just didn't come.

Nice retirement accounts and second houses was not "the dream." The dream was something bigger, an "ultimate triumph" as Thompson calls it, and they feel like they never quite reached it.

Instead they got the 1970s when it all seemed to crash down in a wave of urban crime, drug hangovers, crazy cults, serial killers of the week, pollution, and stagflation. Keep on truckin'!

A good number of them are still looking for "it." Apocalyptic evangelical Christianity with its rapture tapped into this. The unbalanced Internet techno-utopianism of the 90s and Singulatarianism tapped into this. Qanon's language tapped into this.

I'm a young gen-Xer or old millennial depending on how you count it. As a rule my generation is a bit jaded on movements and idealism, partly as a reaction to what many of us see as the delusional thinking of our parents.

I hope to leave the world better than I found it, but I don't expect some kind of shining utopia to rise from the waves. If we manage to solve the big problems of our era like climate change, sustainability, and wealth inequality, their absence will merely reveal other big problems that were building under the surface. Life is beautiful and fascinating but it's also a perpetual struggle against entropy.

Yes, but that means deciding which content is harmful, and that's where we are now. Figuratively, you end up with lead-lickers coming out of the woodwork saying that their way of life is being stifled by regulation/moderation.

Chasing user "engagement" has been pushing conversations from the mundane middle toward the fringes. Thus, people make understandable but hasty generalization[0] that what they're seeing is more common than average.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization#Inductiv...

In the past, I think this drift was counteracted by codes of morality (whether internalized, reinforced by people you know, or promulgated by regulatory bodies) as well as the limited means of disseminating information (few newspaper editors/radio announcers/news anchors to many readers/listeners/viewers). Though I'm sure there were plenty of wild pamphlets spreading chaos in the centuries between Gutenberg and Zuckerberg.

Even though most of those morality codes are downright oppressive by today's standards, and the many-to-many distribution enabled by the Internet has many benefits, we haven't found a substitute, so there's a gap in our armor.

Side note: Believing conspiracies and yearning totalitarian are two different failures in thinking. I say that because only the latter had strong support in the 20th century—even earlier if you count monarchies. Someone supporting Flat Earthers isn't harming me (except by undermining science in general); someone supporting Stalin 2.0 is an indirect direct threat to me.

There might be something to be said for instead of limiting speech, increasing the 'reporting requirements'. This isn't a fully formed position of mine but rules along the lines of no anonynomous speech[0] and stricter fraud[1][2] rules are imo compatible with free speech and its ideals while helping to manage fraud and propaganda.

[0] So if an AI wrote a blog spam post, it should be at minimum illegal to not have the AI in the byline, with e.g. a unique identifier.

[1] Say loudly and publicly that there is a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizzeria, with no evidence, go to jail.

[2] Not that such rules can't/haven't been abused before though.