People are crazy
But that doesn't mean they're wrong
Legitimately just watched a TikTok about how the earth is upside down now and the moon is rising from the wrong cardinal direction. Apparently whoever caused the Mud Flood and reset history 200byears ago is getting ready to do it again.
Look, I know conspiracy thery culture has been in overdrive for years, and it's to the point now where we are entering clinically diagnosable mass psychosis territory. It's an episode that future historians (assuming anyone is alive enough to be a historian in the future) will recall with horror and shame.
I have a theory though. I think what's happening is the cozy bed of blissful obliviousness some people have lived in forever is no longer able to cope with the pace of change in technology and culture. Myths developed by some subcultures are no longer strong or singular enough to insulate people from information generated and shared outside those subcultures.
As a result, people are finding themselves confronted for the first time with a world that contradicts the mythologies they're accustomed to. They're stumbling across the border between their carefully manicured worldviews and this actual planet where things aren't words or concepts. To them it seems like a literal pole shift where the world as they knew it has given way to this weird planet full of confusion, where nothing makes sense and anything that seems to is immediately met with suspicion.
Maybe it's the collapsing global neoliberal capitalist empire, or the outskirts of the technological singularity, or the decreasingly subtle conversation around civil rights, or all of that plus other stuff I'm not thinking of. Regardless of the causes, the effects are a mad scramble for stability and a return to "normal", especially for people who found their own value within a now-defunct social order of simple beliefs and insulated communities.
Ultimately I guess what I'm saying is that the situation on planet earth right now is one of not only economic and cultural upheaval, but for many it is literally existential upheaval. And if our own history is anything to go by, the next 20 years might make the fascism of the 1930s look like a test tube experiment.