In many cases, there is direct, tangible existential crisis at stake when aggregated across all the individual disagreements. The rise of modern white supremacy, fascism, insurrection, environmental devastation, harm and denial of basic rights to trans people, and so on. If in every individual case, you leave it unchecked and figure “whatever, they can just believe whatever they want, who cares” then it adds up to rioters charging into the Capitol with Confederate flags and pipe bombs. Working backwards it creates impetus on everyone to not leave any of that unchecked, whether it’s your crazy uncle on Facebook spouting off about young earth creationism or anti-environmentalism or a white supremacist yelling claims that the presidential election was stolen.
If you’re just disagreeing about which potato chip brand is the best, by all means let it go and leave it unchecked, but it seems clear the general context is about disagreements on contested social issues with serious stakes.
In a lot of ways the main issue is that several generations of the developed world have completely wasted decades of prosperity, to the point now where it really, actually is true that “mundane” day to day problems for people actually tie in to serious existential problems that have to be collectively dealt with.
> to the point now where it really, actually is true that “mundane” day to day problems for people actually tie in to serious existential problems that have to be collectively dealt with.
The only thing this applies to is global warming. It is not an existential threat for Bob to think there was election fraud during the Trump election anymore than Ted the Bernie supporter to think the election was stolen from him twice.
Spreading the idea that the US government can afford to give $1200/mo UBI to each of its citizens by simply taxing the rich is more dangerous to the stability of the government/economy than some dipshit thinking the earth is flat.
Finally, as for climate change, we have the facts and people don’t care. They didn’t care in 2002, they didn’t care in 2012, and they didn’t care in November. At this point, convincing Bob has not worked, and frankly it doesn’t matter because it’s not a problem that can be solved through individual actions.
The solution is to legislatively fix it with intelligent people from both sides of political spectrum if it needs to have staying power (ala cap and trade). Or, if the Democratic Party is very confident in not losing the majority in the next 8 years or so, just ram a non-market approach down everyone’s throat (ala oil/coal bans) and call it good.
There are way too many people who still take the Bible/Koran /whatever seriously to clutch onto the notion that correcting people with facts is going to actually fix anything.
I do think the current rise of anti-truth fascism forking out of the Republican party is an extremely serious existential threat to the US. It does matter to challenge every false claim of a stolen election.
