10/26/20 - Addictive Outrage, Empathy's Path, A Nation in Heat

Todd & Brian return discussing the direct parallels between ideological and theological religion and what Dan Carlin calls The Heat: trivial outrage manufactured to manipulate media consumers for advertising profits, and how it affects us as a society. And, does it matter if our outrage triggers are fake? Is social media contributing to a literal devolution and destroying eons of self-domestication? How do we reclaim our human empathy? Are we returning to naked barbarism as we become slaves to emotional impulses that just "must" be expressed/inflicted? Also, fertile revolutionary soil and how it's the suffering who are susceptible to Snake Oil Demagoguery, Manchurian propagandists, the Electoral College, and Mencken's disturbing concept of irredeemably. What if there is no solution?

Dan Carlin's "A Recipe For Caesar": https://www.dancarlin.com/product/common-sense-319-a-recipe-for-caesar/

The Crowd: Mencken or LeBon?

Several times over the last few years, I'd bounced a counterargument around in my notebooks: the possibility that LeBon's character sketch of The Crowd has it backwards. The existence of a mob mentality is unquestionable, but maybe it doesn't psychologically transform an otherwise reasonable individual into a frothing barbarian. Instead, perhaps the induced hypnotic flock-state simply unleashes the domesticated savage's suppressed impulses; ones that are always boiling just beneath his thin civilized veneer.