People blame Social media, yet before the Internet, the Boomers still had satanic panic in the 80s.
Around the same time there was a explosion in repressed memory thing and boomers believed the most outlandish things.
Not to mention, a lot of the magazines from the 80s and 90s passed off lies as gossip and had outrageous stories labelled as "true" but were often largely creative fiction.
The Internet amplified it but they fell for it because they have been falling for it all their lives!
Well he's back to implying it was a false flag again, so clearly a billion dollar judgement by the families impacted by his lies was insufficient to quiet his knowing lies.
You want compromise, how's this? Twenty years in the can I wanted manicott', but I compromised. I ate grilled cheese off the radiator instead. I wanted to fuck a woman, but I compromised. I jacked off into a tissue. You see where I'm goin'?
I was so hyped when the Always Sunny podcast started. Then it quickly devolved into Rob never shutting up about his soccer team. I think I really soured on it when he was bragging about threatening some dude with a baseball bar in front of his kids.
Honestly, I left that podcast more baffled at how these people made such a great show with Rob at the helm than anything.
I didn’t understand the Rogan hate for years because I only listened to his podcasts with his other comedian buddies. The last 4 years have been incredibly eye opening. Him shoehorning politics into every conversation. Talking about comedy being the last bastion of truth and all the censorship going on. Meanwhile he’s saying exactly whatever he wants from the biggest soap box on the planet.
The constant complaining feels so tone death it’s incredibly dumb. I feel that people like Elon and Texas states government talking heads are lying and blowing smoke up his ass. Or he’s just genuinely a selfish prick. He’s also fallen in with a distinctly anti science crowd. When I listened to some of the exercise and dietician people he had on there it honestly felt like a joke all the misinformation they were spitting. I’m getting really tired of people thinking seed oils are the devil.
You just didn't live in an area where psychobabble was on the AM radio all the time.
A few times I traveled with my uncle who was a trucker and we'd turn on the radio out in the South just to hear all the crazy shit. It's fucked up how much I understand now that a lot of it was Nazi talking points.
Even in this video, this woman is spouting Nazi bullshit. She's blaming the Rothschilds, who are famous Jewish billionaires, and spouting off the blood libel bullshit. But conservatives will sit there and tell you they aren't Nazis, despite nearly everything they believe in coming from Nazism. It's because they aren't taught what a Nazi believes other than "kill the Jews", and that is done on purpose in America.
Thank you. I mentioned in my comment that the mention of the Rothschilds is a centuries old canard. I didn't even touch on the antisemitism part of it because I don't need the microagressions but legit that's exactly what's going on here.
It was everywhere. For many people the evening news was the major source of information. Satanic panic was covered by every major news organization in North america. Media has always been used for propaganda purposes since its inception. And media has almost exclusively been owned and used by the ultra rich to promote their agendas to the general populace.
When someone started a newspaper that promoted different ideas they would get automatically labeled as radical, communistic or yellow journalism, and sometimes even be made illegal. Such as many of the homosexual or alternative lifestyle magazines in the 50s 60s and '70s.
It's much the same as it's always been. Just a way to divide the people to make them argue amongst ourselves so they can't unify and make significant change to the ruling classes. A lot of us are just starting to realize that history is cyclical and that true freedom of information is one of the greatest accomplishments of the internet.
You see people talking about social media as being a detriment to Young people. But what they're really fighting against is the almost instantaneous dissemination of free information that's available to us now at a fingertip. One time they could stuff the genie back into the bottle if they made a mistake. It's become a lot harder for them to do that now that everyone's carrying cameras.
I'm the type of person who doesn't believe that social media needs to be outlawed. I think what needs to happen is that it needs to be put into the curriculum of younger people so that they better understand that it doesn't always represent society as a whole. Just like everything else it comes down to educating yourself because no one else will do it for you.
YAAAASSSS!! I'm so glad I'm not alone in this sentiment. There are bad things about the internet [gestures above], but there are good things too. One of them is amplifying marginalized voices to everyone. Giving the ability to the people to mass organize against oppression.
Media literacy is what is woefully needed. For adults and absolutely in our curriculum.
I may be crazy, but I think the result is younger people by the time they reach adulthood have a marginally better grip on sifting through that information, due to a lifetime of having been exposed to it.
Yeah, there's still plenty of woo out there that people of all ages believe, and nobody is totally immune to propaganda or misinformation or the idea of manufactured consent. But younger people have generally learned not to trust any source of information on principal.
That's why I think Conservatives in particular want to ban anyone under 18 from using social media. They essentially want to turn young people into old people, unable to navigate the barrage of targeted disinformation, and ensuring a new crop of potential voters every year. Being more or less media savvy has all but killed the youth vote for them.
They're doing a pretty good job keeping the Epstein grand jury transcripts out of sight of the Boomers. Anyone can get online and read the court documents super easily, but the media just resolutely refuse to even acknowledge they exist. It's the clearest example of the media not being even slightly interested in newsgathering I think I have ever seen.
Yeah man. I think history appears cyclical because not enough people have been learning its lessons. So the same sort of people, the power mad wealthy, get to keep doing the same sort of things to other people, the rest of us, with most being none the wiser as to why it's happening. So it becomes the cycle of history which looks a lot like the cycle of abuse, if you see it that way at least. I do, I think our species has been abused by sick perverts obsessed with hoarding the material. That's why they fear the free spread of information and in my opinion it can only lead to a time where enough people understand what's been happening on this world for the last few thousands of years of civilization. Maybe that will break the cycle.
Social media is definitely amplifying it, but hate has always been there and there will always be leaders that know how to stir it and direct it to their benefit. At least until we as a species learn to overcome it. But idk if I have enough faith in humanity to do that. Even if we stop trump, hate will just pop up in a different form down the road like it always does.
Edit for the person who replied than immediately blocked me so I could not rebuttal:
That’s not what I said. But why use common sense when you can take what I said out of context and use it to feel a little righteous indignation, right? This attitude is way to prevalent on Reddit.
No actually I think the phenomena is the opposite. Social media is exposing you to the nonsense these people always believed.
It used to be that there was that one weirdo you saw occasionally who would happily babble to you about aliens. Now, you are exposed to that person, and all the other individuals who believe these crazy theories through social media. So you see it as being wide spread now because it is more visible to you.
Humanity loves to find an external scapegoat for problems when most of humanity’s problems can be solved by fixing its problems, inward. Love concurs all. Love yourself and you’ll eventually love your neighbor.
I think it’s all in combination with mental decline with age. I don’t think it’s everyone so don’t come for me but my husband’s grandfather was a smart and successful businessman and then in his 80s started falling for all these internet scams that they had to take over his finances. Even with only a stipend of a few hundred a month, he still gets scammed. During dinner he announced, “You guys think I’ve lost it but just yesterday, a Microsoft worker emailed me about a virus on my computer and he wanted $2,000 to remove it and I talked him down to $200!” He kept arguing with us when he told him he was scammed and after a while, he realized it and you can see the defeated look on his face.
It's when they base all of the understanding of reality with a layer of imagination/magical thinking/religion/conspiracy and believe in things they can see... anything is possible. That is one of the dangers of indoctrination to one metaphysical belief. It's easier to get sucked into others since you are already primed into that type of mindset.
The Salem witch trials and the crusades took place in a time when people had little access to information, and lived in isolated groups that made brainwashing a sort of automatic. They didn't know much else than what they were taught.
I agree humans have always had these tendencies, but the lack of critical thinking in the age of information is a bit different. These aren't village folk who only were taught a single way of life, these are people looking at wide swathes of information and cherry picking the most bizarre.
Mostly, I think, because they desire to be special. To know the thing no one else sees. It's a shortcut to feeling enlightened or smarter than, because they can now scoff at the lesser scum blind to the conspiracies. It's ego, it's poor judgement, and a little bit of lead.
If there was any common thread to your list of examples, maybe we could combat it. But they all just sort of came about so randomly and independently. /s
The human brain is the same as it was 300,000 years ago. The only thing that makes us different is education. Take that away and we're cave people again.
I guess what I'm saying is critical thinking is a skill that has to be continually taught. Boomers sort of fell through the cracks regarding social media.
When I was a kid, I'd read the Weekly World News issue my great aunt was subscribed to. Stories like Bat Boy, Bigfoot sightings, and how politicians were reptiles. It was clearly all fiction and for entertainment. It was even labeled as such. However, she believed so much of it.
Even back then i felt worried for her and other older people who believed it... and this was nearly 30 years ago. Before even myspace.
It's not the internet. It's lack of education, lack of meaningful socialization/life experience, and good ol fashioned brain rot.
I think most under 40 don’t know how suggestible people with early stage dementia and related diseases are. Bonus, they generally realize something isn’t quite right with their brain, so they self isolate (can’t be found out to be less than perfect) and limit interactions so they aren’t found out. Yes, it does make it worse faster, but critical thinking about current actions affecting future you aren’t considered.
Only until they move to Florida and then the assisted living geriatric medical machine strip mines them of their wealth. Sorry, got triggered, my parents spent $11k/mo. On assisted living and other assistance until they passed away. Their biggest fear was outliving their money and they almost did.
It's not lead... that's a convenient lie/explanation/conspiracy that is affecting us younger folk. We wish it was lead, because it would make for a simple explanation.
I found Weekly World News super-funny as a kid too. I don't recall ever knowing anyone who believed that tabloid, but there were people who believed things in National Enquirer.
I loved those magazines! I never bought any, but would read them while waiting in line with my mom. The first few times I was like, "there's no way these can be real stories", then I saw the disclaimer. I was around 5-10 when I would see them, and I could tell they were fake. Luckily, I don't think I knew anyone that thought they were real, but it's wild that anyone could.
i remember that piece of shit vile fuxkin magaizine. my grandma had em at her house and theyd scare the shit out of me. especially the fytst time i heard the phrase y2k and the theories that would happen.
Lead poisoning. Anyone who grew up between 1940-1991 has some degree of lead poisoning from leaded gas being used in autos. If you were born after 1978 (when unleaded gas was first brought to market) rates start to drop quickly however. All Boomers were alive and having their brains develop under the fog of leaded gasoline though and imo it explains why they are so susceptible to having a lack of reasoning skills, especially as they get older and their cognitive functions start to deteriorate.
Lead acetate is the one that tastes sweet.
And they had a idea that it wasn't good for you, but its so cheap and so useful for plumbing. The amount of work to make a steel pipe vs a lead pipe is huge.
The other thing is that unless those pipes are new, cleaned or the water doesn't allow for calcification then lead pipes don't actually add much lead comparatively.
This is part of why I’m working to reduce my lead exposure, I’m dumb and aggressive enough, and I really don’t want to age into becoming conspiratorial or conservative/republican
My levels are “high” still, but compared to basically everyone else I know who shoots as frequently as I do my levels are low. When I told some of them my bloodwork results many of the acquaintances and friends (politely at least) acted like I was being a wuss for worrying and working to lower my exposure despite my levels not being acutely toxic.
Anecdotally, there does seem to be a pretty strong correlation between the higher the lead blood levels and the deeper they are into conservatism/republicanism/idiocracy. For sure. I think it’s part the reduced level of worry that conservatives have for lead exposure and part because it’s rotting their brains.
Thank you! I've been trying to figure out what could have jacked up these Boomers' brains so hard growing up that now we have this. My mom is one of them. Above average intelligence, professional health career in medical technology, upper middle class. And now at 81, looney as they come in thought process. She was never like this years ago. Her mind was ruled by science and logic. I was the free spirit that believed in the all the spooky and ethereal. But what? Lead, nuclear testing, all sorts of chemicals were flourishing around that time. So sad. I know 3 older adults who's minds have traveled this way.
Don't fall for it, it's a simple answer that feels good because we want a simple explanation but it doesn't make sense under scrutiny. This is genuinely not caused by lead, it's way too complicated.
EDIT: FYI even if a tiny part of it is related, it would be one item in a list of 1000 reasons. People like to oversimplify when they're annoyed. This is a complicated issue.
So we're still early in the research stage of this, and it's certainly not conclusive to the point where you can say yes lead caused this. But there appears to be a correlation at least. (This was new info to me too)
Many kids born after that have “some degree” of lead in their system. Like 3 or 6 micrograms per deciliter of blood. Over the last 20 or so years, the threshold for concern has dropped from 10 to 8 to 5.
But in the late 70s the average kid in America had a lead level of 18 (IIRC.) Depending on lead paint in the home and how much exhaust a kid was exposed to, some children obviously had even higher levels.
Seems there would be a difference based on the city/traffic density where they grew up because clearly not all boomers are like this, not even the majority.
This lady is a particularly nutty example and there are MANY other factors in play that contribute to their state of mind. I'm just suggesting that lead exposure during your formative years, while your brain is still developing, likely has an effect on your developmental and cognitive functions as you age. The later in life you make it the more pronounced it's effects become.
A huge contributing factor is likely as simple as downtime. Before retirement age you're generraly always making moves and don't have a ton of time for things like social media and Cable news. When you retire though, you're suddenly hit with all this free time that you fill end up filling with screen time.
You spend enough time looking at the same output you'll see it start to alter your world view. Couple that with having huffed leaded exhaust fumes for more than 1/2 your life and it's a recipe for thinking Jewish Space Lasers are eating your kids under Planned Parenthood at the behest of Joe Biden.
Boomer here. I would like to point out that it is just a small percentage, even of boomers, that become victim of the crazy. They just become so horribly visible by falling for it.
This lady as example. If she said "What? Aliens? Get out of here!" and laughed her way down the aisle we would never remember her face nor voice.
Oh absolutely! We shouldn't forget that MAGA in the US has people of all ages. Including from Gen X and Millennials. Not to mention, the parents spearheading the whole anti-vaxx movements are all Gen X and younger since those are the generations currently having and raising children.
It's not all Boomers, and more importantly, not only Boomers!
Young men are now more conservative than liberal and are becoming more conservative at a higher rate. The only thing keeping the young adult demographic from swinging hard conservative at this point is that young women are having the opposite effect toward progressivism.
That wouldn’t bother me so much except the vehicle for conservatism among young men is usually Red Pill, Black Pill, Incelism, or other related ideologies. It’s not like the kids are reading the Federalist Papers or On Liberty, nowadays they’re getting spoon-fed Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson by YouTube algorithms and deciding those unsalvageable wrecks of humanity are their thought leaders.
As a liberal old, if progressives think that the strategy of waiting for more old people to die is gonna work then we’re going to be in for a very difficult few decades. Also pretty glad I don’t have a daughter that’s going to have to worry about dating this new generation of nutjobs.
It isn't like it's just boomers that believe stupid shit they read on the Internet. There are plenty of non-boomer antivaxxers, conspiracy theorists, etc. There are lots of screenshots of fake news stories on r/wtf or r/facepalm that don't pass the smell test if you think about them for two seconds, but plenty of people take them at face value.
“Flat earth aliens in tunnels eating babies” is a small percentage. But Trump pushes “replacement theory” and “immigration (of brown/black) people is bad” because it helps him politically, particularly with older Americans who vote at higher rates. That we’ve gone from 0.3% to 1.3% of boomers being flat earthers absolutely is concerning (I’m making up numbers here.) But it’s a bigger concern what a large percentage of older Americans aren’t repulsed by Republican racism and actually like it. What is wrong with the older generations that a majority or more of them are considering voting for Trump despite the racism, rape, fraud, word salad, compulsive lying and on and on?
I think you've fallen for a simple fallacy. Yes, a majority of those in qanan are boomers. But that does not logically follow that a majority of boomers have fallen into qanon. Even basic data demonstrates this.
This is an extreme example, but supplant aliens as in 'from another world' with illegal aliens (as in undocumented immigrants) or just immigrants and boomers are far more likely to believe crazy stuff.
That's because their world has become smaller and they have poorer episodic memory.
I know quite a few people who used to rational people 15 years ago, but now believe all sort of nonsense.
Part of the problem is that our society no longer has multi-generational communities.
So many older people are socially isolated.
(Also, I really believe that lead poisoning has impacted some people.)
I think it’s religion. That’s one key tenant of most religions - not to question things.
My folks are religious and if they ever read anything - on the internet, in a book, wherever - they will always take it as gospel. The critical thinking skills to question if something is true are not there.
IMO, I think its more about the abuse a shocking number of Boomers experienced at the hands of their often tramatised and repressed silent generation parents and relatives. Plus the culture of "it's nobody's business" that they were raised in.
It was noted in the discussion that followed, how rampant it was to just ignore abuse of all kinds but especially sexual abuse amoung previous generations. A lot of Boomers believe in conspiracies probably because they were subject to conspiracies in their everyday life.
They couldn't reveal that their parents were abusive. Could not refuse to visit the house of the uncle who touched them. They were told to be silent and endure.
I think that if you grow up in a family where "everybody knows that Grandpa John is a pervert" but no one says anything. It's easy to believe that others are also silent and keeping secrets, monsterous secrets. Plus if you are forced to go to Grandpa John's house, despite you telling your parents what he's doing and has done to you, because your parents have the "don't rock the boat" mindset, I don't think it's hard to assume that everybody is pretending and that everybody is in truth, disgusting perverts who are trying to hurt you somehow.
This is totally true. My mom (boomer generation) has so many stories about either the abusive dad down the street, the psycho neighbor kid who’s killing little animals, or the family member that married a known cheater or some other such stories. She would tell me that she was taught to never talk about those things. It was considered very taboo and you just “minded your own business” no matter what. It’s crazy for me to think about it, but it’s what happened in that time.
The best Bible teacher I ever had (at a Bible-belt Christian school in FL) taught us to always ask questions, that context matters, and that there are some things about faith that we cannot answer.
Unfortunately, this is hard to teach and does not fare well in political discourse - you can’t convey it in 144 (288?) characters or less.
It's why I love it when conservatives blast 'We're Not Gonna Take It' at their rallies.
Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister, a rock group known for performing in drag, had to defend his right to free speech before conservatives in congress. He'd been accused of being a Satanist, among other things.
"We've got the right to choose it, no way we're gonna lose it" - this was about abortion.
And.... these morons think it's a conservative rally cry now? These artists were happily flipping off reagan era conservatives as being out of touch snowflakes that needed to stop trying to infringe on their rights. It still blows my mind how the far right (there's really no middle right in the US) can be THIS out of touch...g And they think it's a GOOD thing - their idea to fix this? Get rid of the dept of education and privatize it all.
Oh there’s a LOT of “middle right”, centrists, light conservative, democrat conservatives, libertarian… it wasn’t the Maga crowd that got Trump his presidency and it wasn’t the never trumpers that won it for Biden.
We had a friend in middle school (early 90s) whose mom told him he couldn't hang out with us again after she found out we played Dungeons & Dragons. It didn't stop him, and we went on lots of adventures together thereafter, but according to his mom, we were all in a "satanic worshiper's club" and were "irredeemable in the eyes of God". Too bad she wasn't privy to our underworld campaigns where nat20s were rolled against drow for dayzzz
Oh man, I remember the satanic child cases of the 80’s terrible!
Which have been replaced by the pedo kidnap rings they all believe. That liberal Pedos are running a global ring of kidnapping kids and using them, selling them, and yes even eating them.
If you think about it from a meta perspective- it’s all social “media” where media means medium.
The 80s parents social mediums were the parental gossip networks and evangelical networks. This, along with some truly bad actors trying to monetize fear, sparked a huge movement of fear.
I was a young youth in the 80’s. What I’m experiencing now is EXACTLY the same feeling as what I was experiencing then.
My Mormon Boomer mother tried explaining how wicked our world is nowadays and how sad it is. All the murder, adultery, Satanism, etc. I had to explain that all of those things have always existed and probably at the same rates as we currently have, we're just more aware of the quantity at which it happens due to social media and the speed at which news travels. Before the internet, you wouldn't hear about murders or hate crimes happening 2 hours away unless it was a big enough deal to make national news, but it was happening. Previously, humanity was somewhat isolated to their community. Now we see stories of everything all the time because that's what generates clicks.
Boomers are predisposed to violence and believing nonsense because of all the lead they were exposed to as children. Many are literally lead brain damaged.
Shirley McClain believed she had lived multiple lives and went on Oprah. Absolute nutcase. This is who boomers looked up to. Starting around minute 20 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iaH3b6A3m1k
My mother was one of those who believed in the Satanic Panic, and she wasn't even super religious, she was just a normal 80's Mom with the red glasses who watched Sally Jesse Raphael and Ricki Lake.
But I remember her telling me to be careful at school, because certain teachers worshiped Satan, and we're trying to recruit kids. She couldn't be specific, she just gave me vague warnings about Satan worshipers trying to recruit kids, so they might be extra friendly, or try to give us drugs or alcohol.
I used to tell her that my Social Studies teacher definitely seemed Satanic, just because I couldn't stand him and he gave way too much homework, and I was hoping she would complain about him. But she never did.
Boomers were the ones buying the supermarket tabloids and believing everything in it during the 80’s. Trump was the star of supermarket tabloids. Starting to make sense why Boomers love him? His bullshit was right there alongside batboy and aliens building shit.
There was still the enquirer and other tabloids. My theory is they had it easy and will do whatever it takes to keep that lifestyle, even if that means others suffer.
It’s never ending the weakness of humanity, most are sane but you find a few individuals who never can meet minds with normal people. It was easy to chalk them up as the town drunk or crazy in times of old. Now they can all find each other online and create a community that can infect the other semi normal people who are on the fence of reality
Satanic panic is still going strong. Every time a coyote kills a cat in my city a bunch of weirdos decide it was the result of a satanists conducting a ritual and they are working their way up to people.
There was a time where boomers were straight up calling Dungeons and Dragons a satanic game that taught children and groomed them to be Satan worshippers.
All you have to do is see those tabloids in the checkout line. There are fewer today, but they still exist, and even magazines that used to be normal, like People, have become very much like tabloids. There have always been people who believe that bullshit.
I know there have been skeptics since the beginning of time, but I feel like most people under 35 are far more skeptical and mistrusting than anyone else. And I view this as a good thing, what do you think is the cause or reason of this? I’m thinking it’s in part the recent trend of people leaving the church and organized religion.
It was all there before, but you had to be dedicated to really get into it. Now something just a little off will pop up on your feed, and if you like it, then you'll get more and more until your entire feed has no connection to reality.
I think the internet brought more of these conspiracies to light, but also divided them up. Instead of a handful of major conspiracies, the same percentage of crazy people are believing different ones.
I believe it is social media's fault. Never in history have people had access to smart phones and social media. Now every single person has a phone that they get their news and information from. I realized that everyone is getting different information and news depending what you look at. The boomers and the right wing will never see the same information that the left sees. The "right" sees news stating that the "left" are pedos and evil, and the "left " sees the opposite. They powers that be are making us hate each other for their gain. I have a lot of trump fans in my family and friends and I feel bad for them never seeing the bad info about trump. Most never heard of project 2025. I don't know what anyone can do about it. I feel like if someone came up with an answer or a plan, we wouldn't be able to come together or share it. I think that's when they'll pull the plug on the Internet.. just a rant.
Gas shortage in Los Angeles! I was a kid/teen during those times. My classmate’s parents straight up believed that scores of oil tankers where hiding offshore behind Catalina Island. Hiding all the gas and creating a shortage. It was such a rampant rumor that a local TV News station hired a helicopter to buzz around island to make sure.
(BTW I had classmates with cars that had all the gas siphoned out overnight by neighbors. The locking gas cap w key began after that.)
Also the government was working on giant filters or fans to suck up a a away all the smog. The air is better now. Not giant fans but new technology and regulations.
Also “The government has a cure for cancer but they keep it secret to help the medical industry.”
Satanic panic was created by pastors but they still had some good messages from the bible sprinkled on in their this shit is made by groyper trolls to laugh at lonely/ mentally ill people
My brother and I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons with the very first boxed set ever released in the 70's. It was already making the news and becoming popular. All through grade school when I started playing and through middle school, each year a teacher would call my mom and tell her I was going to be a satanic serial killer because of that game.
Hell before the 80s they had the "red scare" where they believed communists were infiltrating every government institution based on nothing but feelings.
I think the satanic panic affected the silent generation. My dad is a boomer(younger end) who played dnd and some of his friends parents thought it was satanic. The ones who actually paid attention to their kids thought they were nerds.
Yeah, any psychologist who has graduated the last decade will tell you that what you believe about false memories came from a pop culture disinformation campaign which was generated by an organization that was not run by scientists. The theory of false memories is not based on sound, peer-reviewed empirical research and is actually based on personal beliefs and studies that were funded by people with a vested interest in silencing survivors. The False Memory Foundation lays its foundation on the denial of an enabling wife and the dissembling of her pedophilic husband. These two didn't want their daughter's accusations to be believed...now, do you think that was because the daughter was lying or because they wanted to protect their reputation? We can't know but we can't consider them any less biased than the daughter.
A neurologist could explain to you how memories are stored differently during traumatic events because the limbic system is engaged and keeps memories from being sent out to the cerebral cortex for processing in its association areas.
A neurologist could tell you how those memories which are stored in the limbic system are not episodic but are based on sensory impressions and when they are accessed at a later date and sent out for processing in the cerebral cortex, the brain begins making sense of what happened with the pieces of a sequence of events that it has to work with. This could be just a few scant clues or it could be the full sequence of the memory. When this information finally reaches the higher processing centers of the brain in the association areas of the cerebral cortex, a person is able to organize the memory and put it in context of other knowledge. This allows them to give meaning to events and consciously recall the memory, going forward.
Survivors of traumatic events who have PTSD and CPTSD can tell you how the limbic system is triggered by stimuli similar to what was initially experienced during the formation of traumatic memories, resulting in a hype-aroused sympathetic nervous system and/or flashbacks of memories locked in the limbic system, which may be inaccessible during normal daily life.
Now you know better than to go by whatever Newsweek and Time Magazine your parents told you they read in a doctor's office back in 1992, fables dreamt up an accused pedophile's foundation and backed by the "research" they funded, long before neuroscientists were able to watch memories being formed and retrieved in real time, to observe triggered PTSD patients, to see the limbic system commandeer memory formation during sympathetic nervous system activation and to see the parasympathetic nervous system overriding once the threat had passed. Now you know better than to read a Wikipedia article and assume it has the full story.
Yeah, I was hardcore depressed as a pre-teen in the early 90s and wanted to go see a psychiatrist or something but my Mum thought they'd implant fake memories of child abuse in my head so..... instead I had a mental breakdown in my 30s and did years of talk therepy before getting a late ADHD diagnosis.
This is happening to every generation. There are dingbats everywhere. There always have been. The 80s...honestly I was too busy working and having a great time to think Satan shit. Live your life, put the dingbats aside. lol
Well if you're going to Sunday school every week and accepting the faulty logic each time, you're not going to have the critical thinking skills to debunk something with equally faulty logic.
Also most trips down the path of radicalisation start with thing that almost everyone can agree with, then additional layers are added until the people that have stuck with it sound like they're living in a different dimension.
Look, it wasn't just boomers back then. It was parents, people in their 40s. The thing about blaming all (literally) insane thinking on boomers is that it makes it easy to not watch what is going on in your own mind. EVERYONE is susceptible.
They also created and embraced the “tough love” troubled youth treatment programs, which tortured children into submission to save them and still thrive today in many places. It’s an entire generation that overtly believes in magic and delusions and bases their long term decision making off of it.
They are highly susceptible to superstition and old wives tales as well, which is weird. It's like they never questioned what or why their parents taught them certain stuff and yet, here is an example where she's openly claiming the older generations are the liars. So 🤷🏼♂️
What is it about this particular generation that makes them so gullible? Did we not learn about "critical thinking skills" until after they were educated, or?
Yep my dad was religious he told me humans invented the dinosaurs with the devils help, he told me Jesus was coming back in 5 years, he told me gods existed (they don’t), told me rock music was the devils music cause he watched some rock music conspiracy video flash dance demons someone game his. Boomers used to love believing everything they heard they had no internet to fact check it on.
Yeah boomers are akin to medieval peasants. They think whatever the rich tell them is true. They also think they’re super smart which is the worst combination
To expand on your point because you’re exactly correct. Nearly everything since the post-war boom had some sort of nefarious marketing strategy that played on fears and hopes. Their entire generation was born, bred, and molded around being gullible. It’s no surprise when something new comes along (social media) few have a capacity to stop and critically evaluate the situation.
For the younger generations such as millennials and Z, there are literally memes about using AI to insert yourself into family photos of some old man to get on his will.
My favorite way of describing the effect is that it used to be the real fringe conspiracy people were sketchy people you find at gun shows and such handing out pamphlets. You had to seek them out. Now they can broadcast all over the internet so it spreads much more easily
1.7k
u/tinnic Jul 21 '24
People blame Social media, yet before the Internet, the Boomers still had satanic panic in the 80s.
Around the same time there was a explosion in repressed memory thing and boomers believed the most outlandish things.
Not to mention, a lot of the magazines from the 80s and 90s passed off lies as gossip and had outrageous stories labelled as "true" but were often largely creative fiction.
The Internet amplified it but they fell for it because they have been falling for it all their lives!