• ameancow@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Literally, but the sad truth we need to accept is that this is the only way most people engage with anything outside of themselves and their own world: through some dramatic narrative retelling in their heads.

        It has been like this for millenia, since before we had words, we had series of images and imagined events chained together in our minds that made us feel things, or explained the way we felt.

        We have the exact same brains we did tens of thousands of years ago, we are the same story-creature that rather understand the world through a story of heroes and villains than logic and understanding of systems.

        This is what Trump capitalized on, likely drawing from his experience close to WWE and its owners and managers, to learn how people engage with media through cognitive dissonance, and he supplied narratives and dramatic retellings of complex stories to simple minds and won them over so thoroughly it’s now basically a cult.

        If we understood this sooner, we might have been able to get in the middle like Newsom is doing now, and create more engaging stories for them that serve greater good. But we thought ourselves better than that, and tried to scold, educate and demand more from a class of people who simply rather “see their wrestler win.”

    • MrQuallzin@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Honestly, I’m more tired of people bringing this up than of seeing it in headlines.

      How news and headlines are presented are meant to grab your attention, and it’s definitely working because they continue to do it!

      Both written and spoken language are forever evolving, and right now this is how the news is written. Seeing nonsense comments like this on almost every single article is just boring and doesn’t add anything to the discussion.

      In a couple years headlines will be using some other hot ticket words to keep things fresh.