On earth, or just the USA?
On earth. It goes back to what I was saying about constructing our own realities. Our brains are not capable of handling the level of information overload of the world, so by definition we have to filter a lot of it out.
So what we do is filter out anything that makes us feel bad or scared, i.e. if you look at that Oatmeal comic that SF posted, it highlights that humans neurologically see any uncomfortable information as a threat. Not "something to think about", but it provokes a literal fear & anger response. Fight or Flight.
So we filter in anything that makes us feel warm and fuzzy and releases dopamine. Which means things we already agree with and fit our worldview. I.e. confirmation bias.
Back in the old days of 3 nightly news broadcasts by 3 relatively homogenous networks, there was a way around this. There was one "reality" and if it didn't fit your worldview, someone would smack you upside the head and tell you to deal with it. It didn't even matter if that reality was "true", what mattered was that it was uniform and shared.
But now there is SO much information, it's all readily available, that you can literally tailor the reality around you into a bubble that exactly fits the contours of your own personal confirmation bias monster. And the world is desperately trying to cater to it, because that's how you get clicks, and by getting clicks, you get ad revenue. So you've got competing 24/7 news channels that each spit out their differently-biased information based on what market segment they are targeting.
But even worse, literally every web site you go to, every news site you visit, everything you do online is trying to predict based on your cookies and histories what you're most likely to click on (red meat for your confirmation bias monster) so it's actively showing you the things you want to believe in your reality and actively filtering out the things you don't want--without you even having to do the work yourself.
Then it goes even deeper, because the farther down that rabbit hole you go, the more insular and "ingroup" your beliefs go. That's when you start getting into conspiracy theory territory. Because you've already identified which "team" you're on, and when your team starts claiming that the earth is flat, or that the CIA created AIDS to kill black people, or that China engineered this virus to harm the west, or that Bill Gates is going to microchip people with a COVID vaccine, you're faced with again a "fight or flight" question--do I accept this belief or do I get thrown out of my ingroup? Well, in most cases, you talk yourself into a belief that you'd never rationally hold and then find yourself expressing the same pressure on others within your ingroup to hold that same belief. Conspiracy theorists prey on human tendencies because we all WANT to believe that we have special knowledge that others don't. So we are ripe for the picking to believe the things "they" don't want you to know.
So what happens when you're confronted with someone from a different reality? You cannot even fathom how they might believe what they do, because it sounds like facts that are wholly made up out of nowhere and they CLEARLY do not conform to EVERYTHING you've read on a subject, so they must be crazy or stupid. And you pat yourself on the back for being so rational and right without realizing that to them, you sound equally crazy or stupid.
This isn't a problem with America or Americans. It's quite literally worldwide, and it's so ingrained into everything that makes us human that I am quite literally faced with crippling depression when I think about the future of the human race.
We're a bunch of upjumped monkeys who think we're hot shit, and I feel like we're getting closer and closer to doing something that will put a stop to this little "humanity" experiment once and for all.
