You see what you do bc you are an intelligent person, who has learned to trust only what you see with your very own eyes. “1+1=2”, not bc you or I say it is, but bc it’s TRUE, and you have bothered to seek an understanding of such things. However, others are not this way.

Ironically they can be just as and oddly enough even more intelligent than us in some ways, but when confronted with new facts, choose to suspend their critical thinking facilities and trust “daddy” or “mommy” to have made the right choices for them. “1+1=whatever authority says” for these folks.

It’s a wonderful adaptation that lowers the energy to have to think through every single tiny thing, and in a society where the leaders actually care about their people can work out extremely well, however given the real world especially the one we live in today… these “sheeple” have made themselves into being highly dependent upon the good faith of their leaders.

And they are the ones happier and more emotionally well adjusted than we are, who are constantly unhappy, watching our brethren getting eaten alive and caring not one tiny bit about it all, but just being taken care of. They are the ones who are “correct”. Btw, did you believe me just then? Good. Freedom requires eternal vigilance.

These people btw are more likely to keep their jobs and do well in society, rising to higher positions of authority themselves and are thus “better adjusted” than we are. That is a true fact. Our critical thinking doesn’t “help” us, if our goal is to rise in our authoritarian societies. However, evolution seeks not just one but a variety of solutions, and society always hedges its best to keep others around that don’t match the prevailing trends - outside of an authoritian regime, those who are authoritian still existed, while inside of such a regime, we remained as the hold-outs, in case we were ever needed.

Notice in my prior response my use of democracy in the past tense. We may never have elections again in the USA, but even if we do, we seem unwilling to pay the price of education of our populace and especially the critical thinking facilities that would be required for it to function. We will die as a nation due to our negligence and arrogance to have ignored literally the most important and basic things that would have been necessary to have continued to function.

Our media in particular cannot be trusted as all the variety of sides lie. 1+1=3, 1+1=-5, 1+1=πei√, they’ll say anything at all if it gets them clicks and therefore attention. And not even merely for money - for some, the fame alone is enough, and then algorithms refuse to put forth excellent content that is true, and instead promotes cute people who wiggle their butts or whatever. Btw what I’m saying here is a lie too, surely, in the sense that not all of it is the truth. The latter is so hard to find, in that the tiniest misstep throws it all off - i.e. 1+1=1.1? no wait, was it =2.1, perhaps 2.01? Even the smallest mistake allows someone to criticize and say “nuh uh, you are inaccurate in this point!”… and therefore they are correct in their criticism, and have proven my words to be “false”. There are an infinity of ways to be wrong, and I’m not even sure if there is even so much as one way to be correct.

Anyway, make no mistake: Lemmy is not immune to this, we are right there along with all of the other platforms - we (collectively at least) don’t want to hear the truth. You and I might, and like 10 other people too, but collectively, out of the tens of thousands on this platform, “we”, overall, do not. Instead, we spit upon it, and repeat our talking points, and exist inside of our echo chambers, parroting things we’ve heard others say. I know this to be true bc it’s human nature, and bc we are humans - there is no shame in it, in a sense, bc it’s simply true.

Though occasionally I would hope for better. And it is better, slightly, as in better than Reddit, even if not perfect overall (which again, nothing is).

As for leaving the USA, look around: the entire fucking world is moving this way. Fascism has won. The top holdout now is Germany, and they just had that enormous protest against their own far-right party rising. Russia is active again, at this point it looks like the USA will join it, and WWIII is around the corner, unless other nations simply capitulate preemptively, which at this point looks strongly as if they might. Or perhaps I’m wrong and none of this will happen. The powerful people cover their tracks well, and perhaps my overactive conspiracy-addled brain sees patterns where none exist. It’s so terribly complex that people need decades to study such matters, but the rest of us have to go to work in the morning so don’t have the time to solve the entire world’s problems. And then those who actually do, can’t manage to get the word out, bc nobody is listening. Except us crazy folks, who don’t know what to actually do about any of it. Probably bc there is nothing to be done. In part bc we’d have to start by acknowledging that our enemies have some intelligence or at least strategic thinking ability of their own, and to say something like that about the likes of Huffman (of Reddit), Musk, or Trump, receives tens of downvotes, hence makes us pause to speak, or if & whenever we do, profoundly limits the reach of the audience. Study history, if you want to be more depressed than you already are, like Machiavelli - it’s very sad (to me) but also true, it would seem.