[gooseyard]

At risk of sounding argumentative, another way of looking at this I think is that the community of people in the US who have known only a facts-first approach to reality are now discovering the size of the community of people whose worldview is effectively tribal. I was raised in a very rural community and many of my most vivid memories are of members of my extended family recounting stories which I now know are urban legends, joking knowingly with one another about how so called experts in far-off cities were confused, and cautionary tales about the horrible things that members of other races would do to you. You can imagine how confusing it was then to go off to college and then to see the world and meet people and discover how much of the mythology I'd absorbed was no more than that.

The bulk of the people I've described had very little interaction with the world outside the area where they lived, and the only way they were likely to interact with someone from the facts-first community was via a letter to the editor of some magazine (which might not be published), or if an outsider came to visit, in which case politeness might avoid a confrontation.

Social media introduced these two groups to each other, each group thinks the other is comprised of fools and neither is shy about saying so, and here we are. In my own family, I have yet to see a case in which a member of the tribal knowledge community was moved by an argument from a member of the facts-first community; their belief structure seems to ossify at around pubescence and compromising on it in any way would risk a loss of status in that community.

I take some comfort in believing that we have not been plopped into a post-truth reality, but rather that providing the internet to rural tribal communities was rather like switching on a light and discovering what things had been hiding before our eyes in the dark. I think its also a generational issue because the difference between my old relatives and their offspring my childrens' age is nearly as stark as the difference between the facts-first and tribal-knowledge communities on the whole. While it sucks that this post-truth era will be with us for a while I'm hopeful that the same internet access that led to this schism will also allow at least some of the kids who grew up like I did to be skeptical about tribal knowledge from a younger age. However you might also argue that now the segment of the entire population who are susceptible to misinformation will be poisoned in the same way I was.

Anyhow thanks for your comment; reading it made me stop to think about something that had been bothering me a great deal lately and it was helpful writing this response.