Item — HN Reader

> "The willingness to believe crazy things increases when it feels like the world is dangerous and falling apart."

People often overlook the socio-economic context of Tulip Mania, for example - Europe was being devastated by the Thirty Years War (60% of some populations killed), there was another outbreak of bubonic plague (people stopped showing up to the bulb auctions in Haarlem), etc. With death so close to so many, there was a sense of there being little to lose by fatalistic risk-taking.

The disruptions we're facing now, while they pale into insignificance, are still arguably the biggest since the Second World War.

But what is particularly concerning now, is the growing group of people who would rather put their trust in shady cartels and oligarchs than their governments, and the increasing numbers of people who think they have a have a vested (financial) interest in seeing their governments fail.

3 comments

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Most of that growing group of people see their lives getting materially worse over time. It makes sense that they’d be desperate and incurious enough to hitch their wagon to a strongman figure who says the things they desperately want to hear. The governments of the western world have done a pretty bad job on the whole with making the lives of the people better. Reversing that trend would do a lot to help solve the problem (few people want to overthrow governments when they are safe and content).

Oh please. I watched some Dutch historical TV footage over the last week. The years after WWII were atrocious, there was shortage of housing, clothing, etc.

The 70s and 80s were not without problems either ( I vividly remember the 80s ). Existential threat, bad economy, high unemployment.

A great many of the people involved were not alive as adults in the 70s and 80s.

I was not alive right after WWII either and can still acknowledge that in 80s we were materially better off, despite there were troubles then too.

>few people want to overthrow governments when they are safe and content

People who are safe and content don't make good consumers. It's in the best interest of capitalism to keep us tired and afraid so "the market" can sell us solutions:

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1994/03/20/

Reminds me of the infamous quote from Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:

“The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism's natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.”

>the growing group of people who would rather put their trust in shady cartels and oligarchs than their governments

The 40+ years of Conservatives constantly vilifying government as a concept was designed to lead to exactly this situation, because they're the oligarchs that run the cartels and they're benefiting tremendously.

The tulip mania extent has been debunked multiple times. It's more of an urban myth.