The core cultural question is whether individuals should be instruments of governments and corporations or allowed to take their own risks for their own ridiculous reasons.
In 2019, governments, corporations, and media in the West used almost every bludgeon in their power to try to persuade the public that the former was preferable to the latter in regards to almost every predicate of a successful civil society. In effect, it was an attempted corporatising of the West.
The gist implicitly being that the world is too complex for the proles to understand and therefore Good Citizens must defer to professional experts and their bureaucracies in regards to domestic policy (or you're a fascist), foreign policy (or you're a Russian plant), healthcare (or you're an antivaxxer), governance (or you're a conspiracy theorist), economics (there will be no inflation; it will only be transient), and so on and so on. "You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science" is the exemplar of this viewpoint. The Stakes Are Too High. There was a coordinated attempt to make of society a national workplace piloted by SMEs and PMPs, with obvious results.
So it shouldn't be surprising that skeptics defined by their questioning of authority started questioning new emerging authorities, especially those they viewed as illegitimate and presumptuous to begin with.
If you live, or perceive yourself to live, in the Neoliberal equivalent of the 80's Soviet Union, of course you're going to doubt Pravda, the Party, and its increasingly outlandish claims as everything becomes undeniably misaligned with the reality around you.
And like the Soviet Union, deprived of real channels of information that aren't propaganda or adversarial (e.g. Pravda or Radio Free Europe), you're left to your own devices and samizdat, which naturally results in "conspiracy theories" and accusations by the State of "bourgeois nationalism" comprised of "fascist reactionaries" and "socially dangerous elements" regardless of what merits, if any, dissent entails.
The professional managerial classes of the West decided that citizens should not be allowed to meet on the level of rational argument and began by denouncing all argument; they forbade their followers to listen to rational argument, because it was deceptive, and taught them to answer arguments by the use of force. And an open society that goes down that road reaps the whirlwind.
In 2019, governments, corporations, and media in the West used almost every bludgeon in their power to try to persuade the public that the former was preferable to the latter in regards to almost every predicate of a successful civil society. In effect, it was an attempted corporatising of the West.
The gist implicitly being that the world is too complex for the proles to understand and therefore Good Citizens must defer to professional experts and their bureaucracies in regards to domestic policy (or you're a fascist), foreign policy (or you're a Russian plant), healthcare (or you're an antivaxxer), governance (or you're a conspiracy theorist), economics (there will be no inflation; it will only be transient), and so on and so on. "You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science" is the exemplar of this viewpoint. The Stakes Are Too High. There was a coordinated attempt to make of society a national workplace piloted by SMEs and PMPs, with obvious results.
So it shouldn't be surprising that skeptics defined by their questioning of authority started questioning new emerging authorities, especially those they viewed as illegitimate and presumptuous to begin with.
If you live, or perceive yourself to live, in the Neoliberal equivalent of the 80's Soviet Union, of course you're going to doubt Pravda, the Party, and its increasingly outlandish claims as everything becomes undeniably misaligned with the reality around you.
And like the Soviet Union, deprived of real channels of information that aren't propaganda or adversarial (e.g. Pravda or Radio Free Europe), you're left to your own devices and samizdat, which naturally results in "conspiracy theories" and accusations by the State of "bourgeois nationalism" comprised of "fascist reactionaries" and "socially dangerous elements" regardless of what merits, if any, dissent entails.
The professional managerial classes of the West decided that citizens should not be allowed to meet on the level of rational argument and began by denouncing all argument; they forbade their followers to listen to rational argument, because it was deceptive, and taught them to answer arguments by the use of force. And an open society that goes down that road reaps the whirlwind.