Is news distorting reality and tearing society apart?
Reality is simple. Something happened. Or nothing did.
But news rarely gives us reality. It gives us a story. And stories aren’t neutral - they spin, they speculate, and they leave things out.
For example: Charlie Kirk's assassination.
What actually happened, at first, was straightforward:
– A person was killed. – Police confirmed it was Charlie Kirk. – No motive was given. – No suspect had been identified.
But the headlines were:
“Assassination sparks fears of political extremism.” “Shooter linked to right-wing groups.” “The rise of campus violence continues.”
The facts were still there, but they became trapped inside the wrapper of story. The wrapper added spin (“sparks fears”), injected narrative (“linked to groups”), and left out what mattered most: no suspect had been named and no motive was confirmed.
Once the wrapper set in, people stopped asking what happened and started fighting over which story to believe. Stories became sides. Right vs left. Us vs them.
This happens every time. The shared ground of truth — what actually happened, what we can all agree on, what could bring us together — gets lost in the distortion of the better story.
I've come to believe that this distortion is dividing us and it's tearing society apart.
Stories are being weaponised by populists who thrive on fear and capitalists who benefit from monetising it. The best storytellers are winning attention and winning power and keeping their power by telling even better stories.
So here is my question.
Is there a way to recover a shared ground of truth? Or are stories too deeply ingrained in how humans process information?
Can we recover from where we are by rejecting news as stories and adopting a different form?
> Stories are being weaponised by populists who thrive on fear and capitalists who benefit from monetising it. The best storytellers are winning attention and winning power and keeping their power by telling even better stories.
It is increasingly costly to reach an audience (especially one of the size that would be required to have a "shared ground") not only in the sense of cash money, but also the attention cost of convincing that audience that those "better stories" (perhaps more shocking, outraging, etc.) they've been told might not be actually true.
News is becoming yet another industry that rewards the first mover -- write that first shocking headline, and all the other outlets have to work 10 or 100 times as hard to correct it later.
the older i get, the more i read of history, and the worse things become, the more sympathetic i am to those who argue that armed revolution is the only catalyst for dramatic change.
and i hate that.
i don't want to live in a violent country. i don't want my neighbors to live in fear because of the color of their skin or their nationality or their accent. i don't want to have a reasonable quality of life tied to whatever employer will give me health care. and i don't want to hurt another person - anyone.
but i just don't see a peaceful de-escalation happening; i don't see any kind of de-escalation happening until enough people decide the profit motive is the wrong motive in all situations and that we need to drastically change the way we interact with the world and one another.
:(
Can we agree to change without collective suffering?
Anyone acting in good faith can find plenty to dislike about markets and prices and systems built on top of them.
But the problem is that anyone acting in good faith can also find plenty to dislike about collective systems built no allowance for markets or pricing.
I hear a lot of people talking about the former, a very rarely do I hear any collectivist or socialists speak openly and honestly about the latter.
Markets and prices are not perfect, but they are useful. Many other concepts are useful too.
As I age, the transformation that I notice in my thinking is simply that I no longer believe there is some perfect socioeconomic system, waiting for us out there. There’s only us, and a bunch of imperfect concepts and ideas. It’s up to us to put them together in ways that work, but I don’t think there’s some perfect arrangement that will solve all our problems for all time.
I can't hear you over the sounds of China's rise to number one, my real life lived experience of the last 30 years of stagnation in the US, and the complete lack of political willpower in US leadership to put any effort into actually doing their jobs.