[jochung]

>dire state of hate speech and vitriol

Yes, things are now so good for the average person that you can create mass hysteria over mean words. Not a satanic child murdering panic, not teenage violence, sex and substance abuse... just words.

Once you stop consuming the outrage crack pipe, it all goes away. It's all a big game of signaling and sophistry. Ask yourself why the average journalist is qualified to whip you into a frenzy on topics that should rightly require years of study to become authoritative on.

You can be trusted, you just gotta turn your brain back on. When there is a breakdown in the accepted mechanisms for spreading social consensus, you go back to primary sources. It shouldn't be a surprise: nature has told us that monocultures are eminently vulnerable. The solution is always diversity, the actual kind, not the ideological puritanism that has appropriated that concept for themselves.