Part of the problem is that it’s engineered - the right wing crowd spend an awful lot of time ensuring their ‘media’ keep prodding and poking the right demographics in the right places to keep them angry, while the misinformation networks keep taking people down a path of disagreement with actual reality, which naturally leads to conflict.
The likes of the Daily Mail and Talk Radio exist solely as a tool to enable the above, but people bizarrely still think they are newspapers and current affairs discussion shows.
They all ensure we are too busy fighting amongst ourselves to stop and notice who the real baddies are, or to realise what the government are actually up to, or to wake up to the fact that we all actually have the power to change everything for the better!
Instead, they have us arguing over people taking the knee instead of educating against ridding institutional racism.
They have us questioning trans issues instead of teaching us all to live and let live.
They manipulate us into jealousy of those who are paid better than us (greedy b***ds going on strike! They already get paid lots! Their salary should be lower like mine!) instead of demanding higher salaries themselves.
They have us blaming environmental protestors for closing a road, instead of attacking big energy companies who are literally destroying the planet and raping our bank accounts.
They tell middle aged white men that they are being persecuted because they should be able to say the racist/homophobic/sexist things that they used to, instead of explaining to them why people are offended by those things and that they always have been, it’s just that now they feel able to say so.
They have somehow managed to turn people who care about helping others, or want to make the world a fairer place or who are prepared to speak up for those who don’t have a voice, into villains who are a threat to us all (the ‘woke’)
They keep creating bogey men to blame for everything, our lack of money, opportunity, freedoms, functioning healthcare etc, instead of taking responsibility and distributing wealth more evenly. For example, It’s all the fault of immigrants …. not the big business paying peanuts or the governments underfunding the NHS or the banks keeping us all in debt or the education systems being skewed to ensure the haves continue to have doors opened and to develop into the have mores, and the have nots stay without etc.
As long as large sections of the media stay under the control of a few super rich individuals, and they get to manipulate how we vote or what we believe or who we blame, things will continue heading down the path of aggression, unfortunately.
Regulation of misinformation and reform of media is desperately needed, and the only way it can come is through educating those who fall victim to the methods employed by those at the top of the tree, awakening the masses to the manipulation, but it’s nigh on impossible to do because who likes to think they’ve been played? None of us.
So how the hell do we start?