There is a war raging on the internet. That war centres around a rather stupid question: are millennials to blame for everything or are boomers? Typical of every internet debate, it is a debate which often lacks nuance; while there are informed pieces on both sides, most of the content amounts to blaming millennials for all the problems in the economy or blaming boomers for the problematic economy as a whole. Generation gaps are a natural part of human life, but why does this one seem so large?
Meritocracy
Is the world a meritocracy? If you work hard will you be rewarded? If you are lazy, will you be poor?
Why do we like complicated theories?
Why does everything have to be so complicated?
Danielle: I heard they found evidence on Vic.
Dutch: Yeah. Maybe a little too much.
Danielle: What do you mean?
Dutch: You ever hear of Occam’s razor? The simplest answer is usually the right one? Good. Now apply that to the Lemansky case. Now all this evidence is pointing to Vic. Occam’s razor would suggest he’s guilty. Walter Chatton a contemporary of Occam’s. Disputed the razor. Coined his own anti-razor.
Danielle: What’s that?
Dutch: Chatton believed that the world was too complex. Too many variables to assume that the simplest answer was always the correct one.
From “Baptism by Fire,” the second episode of season 6 of The Shield.
I haven’t watched The Shield in years, but this exchange has haunted my dreams ever since. The world is indeed a complicated place, and most complex phenomena have complicated explanations, but, more often than not, the simplest hypothesis is the best. Why are so many of us tempted to believe otherwise, like Dutch here?
Why the Status Quo is Always the Most Appealing
We all hate change. I think it’s safe to say that unwanted change in our lives is one of the primary sources of stress for pretty much all of us. Even for those people who appear to thrive on change and chaos, underlying their lives are secret routines they have that we can’t see. If our routines and habits are disrupted by someone or something, this makes us angry, confused and stressed out.
The most obvious reason why we don’t like change is that human beings prefer what’s familiar. That’s a constant throughout human history; we humans have always preferred the familiar to what’s not. We could have a long conversation about why that is, but I want to focus on a second reason why human beings fear change and, more specifically, dislike reform, e.g. socio-political changes. This reason compliments and reinforces our innate fear of the new and different. This reason is The Just World Fallacy.
Women on the Internet
It has long been a cliche of our internet age that the comments section of an article will feature the worst of what humanity has to offer – every kind of discrimination and slander you can imagine, all supposedly enabled by the anonymity of the internet. But the same kinds of behaviour can be found on twitter where many people use their real names or aliases that can be readily linked to them. This bad behaviour, whether it’s trolling or something else, targets various “minorities” more often than not, but often seems to focus on a “minority” that’s actually a majority: the female half of the species. Why is it that women are a persecuted “minority” on the internet?
Wealth
If there’s one thing in society we think we deserve, it’s the money we earn , however we earn it. But do we really deserve it?
Whether we earn money as compensation for work, or we earn interest from investments or profits from a company we own, the vast majority of us are agreed that we deserve the money we are paid. We decide we deserve this money regardless of other factors:
Make America Great Again – Why the Past is Always Better
Donald Trump was recently elected President of the United States of America on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Few thought he would win for most of his 18-month campaign. Then he won. Donald Trump – the huckster Donald Trump, who doesn’t read a book and doesn’t appear to know anything at all about, well, anything except his own branding, is now President of the United States of America.
Trump won for many reasons, but one compelling reason was the use of the word ‘again’ in his primary slogan. We human beings long for the past. When someone promises the past to us we believe him, no matter how incompetent he appears. Why?
Why does no one have respect any more?
Respect. Where has it gone? Why don’t millennials have the same respect that we used to?
Read moreThe Appeal Alternate Facts
The world is a weird place in 2017. Suddenly the term “Alternate facts” is being thrown out by the administration of The Most Powerful Country in the World (TM) and we are confronted with a regime in the US that seems to believe they can make up the truth.
But this shouldn’t be that shocking to us. The powers that be have manipulated “the facts” since there were people in power. It’s just that the Trump administration is more open about it than most governments of liberal democratic countries.
Why We Think Protesters Are Always Violent
Whenever the television news media shows violence stemming from a protest on TV, the tacit assumption is always that the protesters started the violence: they chose to protest, they must have chosen to be violent. When the protesters come prepared for tear gas and the like, it is all the easier for the television media to look down on the protesters as instigators.
We the viewers come to these images of violent protests with the same assumptions: the protesters started it because, had they not protested, there would be no violence. Both media and audience believe that any violence by the police is justified as retaliatory. But why?
