ChatGPT with plugins already does this. Nothing controversial here.

ChatGPT4 made some good points:

Here are some factors that have contributed to the increasing polarization:

Historical Context: From its inception, the U.S. had deep political divisions. The Federalists and Anti-Federalists were sharply divided over the creation of a strong central government in the late 18th century. Over time, issues like slavery, states’ rights, and industrialization caused significant rifts.

Two-Party System: The U.S. predominantly has a two-party system. This tends to create a binary choice for voters, which can exacerbate polarization. Over time, as parties realign and consolidate around specific issues or identities, divisions can become more pronounced.

Media Landscape Evolution: The rise of cable news in the 1980s and 1990s, and later the internet and social media, has played a role in deepening polarization. News outlets and platforms can cater to specific ideological niches, leading to echo chambers where viewers are only exposed to information that reinforces their preexisting beliefs.

Gerrymandering: The practice of redrawing electoral districts to favor one party over another can create “safe” districts where politicians are more worried about primary challenges from their own party’s extremes than about general election threats from the opposing party. This can push politicians further to the left or right.

Campaign Finance: The way campaigns are financed, especially after decisions like the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, allows for significant amounts of money to be poured into politics. This can give disproportionate influence to certain groups or individuals, potentially exacerbating polarization.

Cultural and Social Shifts: Factors such as urbanization, education, and changes in religious affiliation can contribute to political polarization. As these shifts occur, they can create a sense of cultural war or identity politics, further dividing groups along political lines.

Political Leadership: Leaders can either bridge divides or deepen them. At various times, American leaders have taken adversarial stances that have contributed to the climate of polarization.

Economic Inequalities: Growing economic disparities can exacerbate feelings of disenfranchisement and lead to increased polarization. People may feel that the “other side” doesn’t represent their interests, leading to a lack of trust in opposing parties or politicians.

Geographic Polarization: There’s an increasing trend of people living in areas that are politically homogenous. Urban areas tend to lean Democratic, while many rural areas lean Republican. This geographical sorting reinforces political beliefs and reduces exposure to opposing views.

Feedback Loop: As polarization increases, trust in the opposing party decreases, leading to a feedback loop where compromise becomes increasingly difficult.

While polarization in politics is not unique to the U.S., the combination of the aforementioned factors has made it particularly pronounced in recent decades. However, history also shows that the country has faced deep divisions before and has found ways to address or move past them. The challenge is understanding the underlying causes and working towards remedies that can foster dialogue and compromise.

Then I asked if capitalism, may have something to do with it also.

Yes, capitalism and its dynamics can certainly play a role in political polarization. Here’s how:

Economic Inequality: One of the criticisms often levied against capitalism, especially in its less-regulated forms, is that it can lead to significant economic inequality. As wealth accumulates among the top echelons of society, those left behind can feel economically and politically disenfranchised. This can lead to resentment and division, with political factions forming around pro-business interests and worker or populist interests.

Consumer Culture and Identity: Capitalism’s emphasis on consumerism can influence how people see themselves and others. As products and brands become intertwined with identity, political beliefs can also become commodities to be marketed and sold. This can further entrench people into particular ideological camps.

Media Commercialization: In a capitalist system, media outlets are often profit-driven. This can lead to sensationalism or the creation of echo chambers, where outlets cater to specific political or ideological demographics to maintain and grow their audience.

Corporate Influence in Politics: With capitalism, especially in systems where campaign finance regulations are lax, corporations and wealthy individuals can exert significant influence on political processes. This can lead to perceptions (or realities) that politicians cater to corporate interests over those of the average citizen, fueling distrust and polarization.

Globalization and Job Displacement: Capitalism’s search for efficiency and profit can lead to phenomena like outsourcing. This can result in job losses in certain sectors or regions, leading to economic anxiety. Politically, this can manifest in protectionism, anti-immigration sentiments, and a polarization between those who see globalization as an opportunity versus those who see it as a threat.

Differing Economic Philosophies: Capitalism, as an economic system, isn’t monolithic. There are varying degrees and types of capitalism (e.g., laissez-faire capitalism vs. welfare capitalism). These differences can lead to political divisions, with some advocating for more government intervention in the market and others pushing for less.

Financial Crises: Episodes like the 2008 financial crisis can exacerbate political divides. In the aftermath of such events, there are often debates about the role of regulation, corporate greed, and government bailouts, which can further polarize public opinion.

So my take is that the binary choice in politics created a major issue straight from the start. Life is too complicated to put in just two categories, but in the US you seem to manage it. And these political boundaries are very much geograhpy based too, which makes of makes it easy to cater to the polarization, which made it easy to maintain. Then you add to that a culture that favors capitalism and now you’ve got the beginnings of a dumpster fire. Voters can be treated as consumers and consumers as voters. Perhaps the age of mass media is where it really started to go wrong. Essentially you end up with news channels such as Fox news which send out a lot of propaganda for the republic party. Once you’ve got a good proportion of your population in a brainwashed state you’re in a pretty bad spot.

I’d venture to say the political system is what made the citizenry. Genetically people in the US aren’t so different. My guess is that somehow your political system got fucked and that fucked the rest. I’d be interesting to know how it got to that point.

In terms of socialism, yeah I know people over there are totally brainwashed to vote against their own interest. It was just amazing to see how much people rallied against Obama when he tried to introduce some type of universal health care. “Health care for everyone? How dare you!!”. Lordy lord. People are so dumb. Not just americans though, it depends so much on the system.

Here in the Netherlands we have a surplus of PhDs. Not that we are genetically superior. We just have affordable universities and a culture that stimulates learning.

I wonder now whether that means that you feel that egg industry CEOs deserve death threats…

https://youtu.be/udSiluTAOaQ?si=QF7odI0WUCXdUmWS

Oh my god, I knew it was bad, but this sounds god aweful. Why is the US so broken in so many ways? Is it all to due with the 2 party political system? That would be my best guess for a root cause.

Oh yeah, I live in the Netherlands and it is very different here. It seems big pharma is running the show in the US. Although I’ve heard that these kinds of things happen in the Netherlands to some extent as well, the scale of it is not comparable. We don’t have ads for medicine and doctors don’t reap rewards for writing certain kinds of prescriptions. These kinds of things just seem like insanity to me.

Have you seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_jX2KT7AMY ? :)

Would you say that the situation is getting worse, staying the same or (if ever so slightly) getting better in the US?

I am not familiar with that book. Sounds interesting.

Perhaps. I am not an expert. It was an example of a problem where the diagnosis depends more on the social context than on the biological context.

My wife is a family systems therapist and she told me once of a case, where one group of therapist had a child diagnosed with autism and another group found that the parents were the problem and that the child was only behaving in a certain way as a reaction to the parents’ behavior. They had a meeting on the topic and after re-evaluation they decided that the child was not autistic after all.

My main point is that we’re seemingly stuck on one.

Yeah, and my point was that you’re just shifting it from this one (mental health) to that one (the state of the world).

It seems we both acknowledge that mental health issues are complex. Sometimes you really do need to get out of a toxic relationship or find a new career path or move to another city. But nevertheless people need to learn to take responsibility for their mental health. Usually when people do that they also then see that they need to make a change in their circumstances. Even if the state of the world makes you sad, it is still up to you whether you are going to mope all day, do something about it and/or learn to live your best life regardless of that fact.

The good news is that your basic point is largely being acknowledged by the mental health community. My wife is a systems therapist and has been reporting an increased understanding, in the mental health community, of the fact that issues do not live in isolation in someone’s brain as some kind of hormonal imbalance that can be fixed with some pills. Where I am from systems therapy gets covered by basic insurance and family systems therapy even gets funded by the government. We might be a bit ahead of the curve over here, but there are a lot of signs the mental health community is maturing.

With regard to the Biden’s anxiety proposal. I don’t think it is necessarily bad to screen people for anxiety. Anxiety is really out of control since covid and that affects the happiness of a lot of people. It depends what you do with the diagnosis. If that means that people are going to be prescribed mindfulness practices, which will be covered by insurance, then it might be a good thing. Even though America is the land of Xanax, it is also home to people like Dr. Jud Brewer whose book “Unwinding Anxiety” offers a very healthy approach to anxiety. And if people learn to rid themselves from anxiety based on mindfulness practices, there is a much higher likely hood that they will do something about the state of the world then if they are going to be stuck in endless anxiety loops.

There is another point that I’d like to raise. While you point out that the state of the world is pretty bad, I’d like to point out that the average mental health of people is pretty bad too. The two go hand in hand, for sure, but they are also independent to a large part. It is amazing how few tools people have to deal with their own psychological issues. People go to therapists to deal with stuff that they could trivially deal with themselves if they were somewhat better equipped to understand their own mind. From my vantage point most people could really benefit from going into some kind of therapy, meditation retreats, journalling, gratitude practice, solo hikes, etc. but people are super reluctant to do these things. Instead, most people who have mental health issues are not using their time effectively to deal with their issues, but instead complain about the state of the world and blame everybody but themselves. And usually it is also these very same people that fuck up the world. If people can not take responsibility for their own mind, then how can they take responsibility for the world?

Ok, let me see if I get you.

“Mental health” is so all-encompassing in its breadth (It’s basically our entire subjective experience with the world) but at the same time, it’s actually quite limiting in the solutions it implies, as if there’s specific ailments or exercises or medications.

Are you saying that mental health is too limiting in terms of its solutions, because the real world is not involved? For example, I might come to a doctor saying that my child is restless. The child might be prescribed with medicine for an ADHD diagnosis, whereas the root cause is a flaky parent.

I agree with this point.

We’re miserable because our world is bad. The mental health crisis is probably better understood as all of us being sad as we collectively and simultaneously burn the world and fill it with trash, seemingly on purpose, and we’re not even having fun.

How is this not an over-simplification? People are miserable for all kinds of reasons. Of course the problem and the solution is always some combination of the world and how we interpret the world, but sometimes the problem lies more in the interpretation than in the world, right? It may have nothing or nearly nothing to do with climate change or the state of the world at large.

The mental health framework, by converting our anger, loneliness, grief, and sadness into medicalized pathologies, stops us from understanding these feelings as valid and actionable. It leads us to seek clinical or technical fixes, like whether we should limit smart phones or whatever.

Which may be valid under some circumstances, but sometimes a clinical fix as you call it might be in order. Sometimes people are just extremely unkind to themselves due to conditionings of the past, which are not relevant anymore today.

I would agree that solutions to mental health problems need to be examined in a biopsychosocial context, but whereas you say that just looking at the person and not the world is too limiting, I think just looking at the state of the world is too limiting.

I thought you were implying that the mental health framework is an oversimplification, but then you oversimplify the issue yourself by saying that the world is bad. Neither is the truth. It may also still be worth invetigating data related to mental health issues and mobile phone usage.

Hey there mister literal, nobody asked you to take it so seriously

I don’t get it? Why are they talking in the article about not using the right type of encryption. The problem isn’t the encryption, but the fact that it is sending your keystrokes to the mothership, right?

What was your impression of him?