Over the past year or two I've commented on three conventional narratives that strike me as dead wrong:
- The Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster.
- The CDC's response to COVID-19 was atrocious.
- Silicon Valley Bank was a time bomb waiting to go off.
The common thread for all of these was an almost instant desire to find catastrophe whether it existed or not. The Afghanistan and SVB narratives literally coalesced within a day. The CDC narrative took a little longer, but not much.
Now, the usual thing at this point would be to blame social media for speeding up our expectations. We want answers now, and when a disaster is only a few hours old there are no answers available except the most obvious ones. And the most obvious ones are tales of error.
But this still wouldn't be a problem except for the next step: conventional narratives freeze in stone almost instantly nowadays. Nothing about social media is obviously to blame for this. But whatever the cause, neither the media nor anyone else seems willing to back off and reassess things as more evidence becomes available.
Some of this is political. The Afghanistan withdrawal, for example, was literally only a disaster during its first four or five hours. The rest of it went reasonably well, and in the end more than 100,000 people were airlifted out. But Republicans had a vested interest in making it look bad, and that affected the press coverage, which was relentlessly negative the entire time.
That said, the three narratives I mention above are entirely bipartisan. Both Democrats and Republicans alike promote all of them. Politics affects some narratives, obviously, but it's not the whole answer.
But what is? I think it's mostly that Americans have become addicted to doom. Any reasonable read of the evidence suggests that things have been going fairly well for most people over the past couple of decades, but it doesn't matter. We're all convinced that things are far worse than they really are. And once your mind is caught in this frame, narratives of catastrophe will always find a friendly home.
We are all doomscrollers now. But if things are actually going fairly well, why?
Thank you for responding Traveller. You did not explicitly respond directly to my comment, though I will interpret it as if you did.
Afghanistan is an extreme outlier nation. There is no where else on this planet (outside of sub-Saharan Africa) with the demographic and development features of Afghanistan. As a highly underdeveloped nation it has over the centuries almost uniquely posed geopolitical risk at global scale. Afghans defeated the British Empire, the Soviet Empire and probably many others. America with the help of its coalition partners had the first opportunity in history to finally bring Afghanistan into the big tent of typical behavior for our species. This would have been an enormous success for geopolitical stability. It is a big disappointment that the full job was not completed, especially after the major battles with substantial fatalities in action had ended by 2015. The game plan could have been to drift forward, allow stabilization to occur with Afghan military support on the frontlines and then when the official handover back to full Afghan sovereignty happened in 10-20 years the demographics would no longer have allowed for a return to the past.
Also wonder whether an alternate strategy that could have been tried with the withdrawal that did occur was to do a partition and give back control to the Taliban in one sector of the nation. The world could have then watched to see how they would exercise their authority. The implicit understanding being that if they simply returned to their previous behavior then they would not be given further territories to manage.
The fertility collapse tactic would have been quite easy: Just wait out the clock. Over the course of 10-20 more years Afghanistan would have been directed down a path to modernization through the rapid change in fertility that had already been ongoing for 20 years. Basically, keep locked down on the bases and let the inevitable demographic transition continue. Afghan TFR is now ~4.5. Once it reached ~3, Afghanistan would no longer be the threat to global security that it has been for centuries.
Providing girls the chance to have an education by itself becomes a powerful social development strategy. Turning off the exponential fertility increase would rapidly reverse the geopolitical risk from Afghanistan. In the modern world collapsing fertility rates is the natural course of events; all that is needed is some room for such modernity to occur. Combining this with reducing the lead burden in Afghan children would merely turbocharge the development lift-off. Children in Afghanistan have the world's highest blood lead levels. That probably contributes to the development challenges they have faced.
I do not see myself as a male feminist, though the social reality in Afghanistan has changed my perspective (at least in this specific instance). How providing girls even basic primary education ever became a social scrimmage line is not easy for me to understand. No one else thinks like that. Allowing girls to have an opportunity to become educated offers a way around the need to think of Afghanistan in the context of an armed struggle. Helping Afghanistan could be re-imagined more in terms of providing educational support. Perhaps they could think in terms of remote learning. Physical structures of schools are not required for education to happen-- all you really need is a mind that wants to explore the universe of ideas. The resulting demographic change would then have an extremely powerful effect on the tactical situation at street level.
Could it be.....Satan? I mean, Fox News?