Ichor
Vampire Nomad In Training
agree with you heavily, I think it's only this year that I'm actually processing how much "identitarian politics" contributes to dividing people. a lot of it (lies in politics and media and also online) feels like intentional disinformation, like "psychological operations" or something; for me sometimes it gets hard not to succumb to paranoia and fall down the conspiracy rabbit hole. sometimes I'm stuck down that hole for entire days and it's not a lot of fun :/
from an occult-esoteric-mystical POV (magic studies, my main field) I'd say that much of the information that the average person is exposed to during our contemporary times straight-up can't be processed rationally, which is why conspiracy has such an easy time taking hold of people. all politics imo have this unstable emotional quality to them, generations upon generations of trauma coming to the surface, no one really knows what to do or say or think... plus the way in which we are exposed to media as a whole literally has the power to make people fully trance out.
again, I'm biased cos I'm from a magic studies background, but at this point I feel like one viable strategy would be to literally hack the brains of people who cause the most pain, go into their dreams, bind their self-esteem into a knot, incapacitate them psychologically, and make sure people on the ground have the resources to look out for each other without interference from the elites. I guess that's my strategy (if I had to put phase 1 into words), we'll see how well it works out, right now it feels super unrealistic but it's the direction my research is heading in. give people some space to breathe, if nothing else...
I personally think there needs to be serious discussions about the consequences of poor behavior in politics. If you do a, b can happen, and b is not something you want because c and d. If people understood that their actions can lead to things they don’t want they would feel more inclined not to behave in unproductive bad ways, and more empathetic towards other people who are having a really rough time.
A good example is if you emotionally react to a piece of news in strong ways it can make you and any groups you’re associated with look bad. This can affect how people perceive you and consequently what you believe negatively. You don’t want this because it leads to erroneous assumptions about you and people you are close to.
Another potential consequence of emotional reactivity is harming people who are relatively innocent. Humans don’t do things perfectly, and human relations are messy by default even more so when emotions run high. It’s easier to misinterpret people this way. This can also lead to erroneous assumptions mentioned above.