The answer to this question is virtually identical to the question about the rise of Populism around the world….they have the same root cause.
Human brains are pattern recognition machines….we do it really well.
Most pattern recognition is unconscious….always happening, but beneath normal conscious awareness.
And there are very strong evolutionary mechanisms in the brain to preserve homeostasis (reduction of fear; maintenance of identity & self-worth; congruence with existing world-view)
If there is ANY recent pattern that all of us feel, but rarely process consciously, it’s that our world is changing in massive ways.
smartphones, machine-learning, self-driving cars, robots, human-voice interfaces…the list goes on
And the unconscious mind senses this upheaval quite fully….and it also derives a few implicit (and very likely accurate) conclusions in response:
- The world / environment that was familiar to me is going away
- My values, skillset, competence and sense of worth are dissolving with it
- Very few of my life-tools align with (or seem valuable in) this new world
This postulate creates a lot of fear in the unconscious mind. As a result, the mechanisms to preserve homeostasis kick into overdrive to try to eliminate the threat. This means prioritizing strategies to return to a “known” environment. This explains the election of Trump, the resistance to science, the rise of populism, the denial of evidence, the reverence for relativism, the focus on “traditional values”, etc.
The high-tech industry is largely to “blame”….and I’m part of it. I wouldn’t change what we are doing, but I don’t deny that we’re largely responsible for this mess. As the changes flowing over us become bigger & more obvious, and the evaporation of the old world-order seems more immanent, this crazy and irrational behavior will escalate even further. It’s going to get much worse before it gets better.
I’ve got some ideas of how to address the problem but I’ll write about those in another post.