Doomscrolls on the left and doomscrolls comments on the right.

Agree, coming from a 3rd country to US what I have personally perceived a lot is the generational loop at the later stage..."Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." — G. Michael Hopf

The Russians must be having a grand old time according to this theory.

yeah all those Good Times created by Hard Men like Mussolini and Stalin

or does this quote refer to Hard Men as in the men who rioted and fought and died for 8 hour work days and basic social services?

The latter

Like anything some is good too much is bad, a gradient work for a complex society, a brutal difference like kings and dark ages poor eventually bring collapse

Wealth inequality was not the defining aspect of the relationship between kings and peasants. It was also not the reason for the collapse.

The defining quality was the mechanisms by which kings extracted wealth from peasants (indirectly, through layers) which doesn’t resemble what we have in western liberal democracies today. Things like tallage and arbitrary taxation, labor dues, mill/oven/wine press monopolies, heriot, merchet.

Serfs were legally bound to the land.

The Black Death killed 1/3 of Europe’s people, giving peasants leverage because without enough workers, lords could not enforce arbitrary dues because peasant could walk out or revolt, such as the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

That’s when the Dark Ages extraction model started to break down. Not because of wealth inequality, though it can see why they get conflated.

If we take the top billionaires in western liberal democracies today, they do not extract wealth from the average worker (there’s no duress, for instance), and it is clear that they have created more wealth than they have “taken”.

they “extract” wealth on the back of shared investments like infrastructure and now our data/IP with AI

it’s not the same as your examples but i’m not sure that it needs to be exactly the same

If you can explain the mechanic, I’m all ears and open to change my point of view.

> Soviet level propaganda

I’d be careful not to conflate billionaires in Russia with those in western liberal democracies. Totally different.

> I’d be careful not to conflate billionaires in Russia with those in western liberal democracies. Totally different.

Actually, they're pretty much the same.

>How is it different from a person believing whatever they read on the Internet?

Maybe cognitive dissonance it seems to me that people tend to trust more when they are being told(chat bot summarizing for them) than when they need an process way more information and summarize themselves (googling).

Perhaps is similar to 90's internet when anything out there was "truth" but less information also was easier to process.

You must go outside your traditional groups(family, friends, colleges) find several activities that you like or you had always wanted to do, meetups etc, stay on them for a while, that's how friendship happens, the key is a new group of something you enjoy, keep doing it, guaranteed will work