Thread by @TruueDiscipline

My pet theory about what explains the immolation of America is the invention of television and later social media.

https://twitter.com/arnolfson/status/1440431944953524245

As Eric Kauffman describes in his book, the rise and fall of Anglo-America the amount of households with television grew pretty rapidly.

This gave a the cosmopolitan elites a voice in almost every American's home

This is more speculative, but seeing the footage of the civil rights movement could give most whites who didn't live around blacks a chance to feel virtuous and look down on the backwards rubes of the south.

In Will Storr's excellent book "the status game" he describes how human actions are primarily driven by status often even over money. amazon.com/Status-Game-Po…

With television, you can gain access into someone else's world, and use their alleged moral faults to gain virtue and thus status without having to deal with any of the consequences that they would have if they were making the decisions that you are preaching.

The era of television proliferation coincided with a massive change in social values.

Fast forward to the mid 2000s, and the rise of smartphones social media. What is commonly referred to as the "great awokening" began taking off around the time the majority of adults had a smartphone.

Smartphones allowed people to "play god" even more than TV. You can judge a police officers actions filmed on a smartphone camera in a tense situation, in a neighborhood you would never set foot, while sitting comfortably in your living room.

In addition, smartphones and social media gave people a way to demonstrate virtue in a way that TV never did. Think about how quickly the "black square" spread across social media last June.

So this new technology broke that natural order where people could only be a virtuous as the constraints of their local environment allowed. Until the consequences of wokeness threaten the safety of its adherents, it will continue on as a major social force indefinitely

Anyways, just my pet theory, pick it apart if you like.