Alternate realities.

Or the 'white heat of technology"

What you are describing here is politics - ie distinct world views fostered for political reasons. I'm talking about something rather more dramatic that started appearing in the social media age (2010). 

The shift is that these views no longer have any significant overlap or are not subsets of a significant shared wider view. I realise i'm describing social disintegration.

I also have a theory about why it happened and the tactic of continuous escalation that caused it.

No one has ever lied so often as Trump.
From day one when he lied about the size of the crowd at his inauguration to his big lie about a stolen election.
He's pathological.

As the old saying goes when America sneezes the rest of the world catches cold. It's 2023 not 1903, we can't just pretend America isn't there, whether you look like it or not America is the world's leading power and it's decisions and actions do impact on us.

You have more patience than me when it comes to explaining these things. Although sadly I suspect that you're banging your head against the proverbial brick wall.

There have always been big differences of opinion between left and right and any other imaginable way of differentiating sets of opinions. But it used to be broadly true that everyone knew what the basic facts were but just differed in what to do about them or in how to change them. Whatever our opinions, we were all generally grounded in reality.

But in recent years, and indeed the problem has been developing for decades, people have started to believe in different supposed facts and alternate realities. This has not just been happening here but elsewhere too. We saw it in spades in the USA with the coming of Trump to the political scene. This disconnect from reality and belief in an alternate reality born of paranoid conspiracy theorising appears to be particularly marked on the right, though the left is not entirely immune either, always ready to see the dark hand of the deep state if something does not go well for us.

But for years now the right have been nurturing the concept of a big bad EU that is dominating us and see it as a malignant force, and got into the habit of blaming it for all our ills. They also began to increasingly reject any science which did not sit well with their own lifelong ideologies. 

Many of them have come to believe in a conspiracy of Remainers, in cahoots with the EU, to drag us back in at any cost, with any failure of Brexit supposedly the fault of Remainers sabotaging their own country. That scientists offering evidence of man-made global warming are all somehow for some reason lying to us as part of some sort of conspiracy, and that because expressing phobic opinions is less tolerated by the majority than it used to be, freedom of speech is under dire threat as well.

In this country many of them have convinced themselves of a paranoid conspiracy theory that intermeshes all these strands, by which the deep state is conspiring to subvert the will of the people by dragging us back into the EU, and if Brexit isnt working, this can only be explicable to them as sabotage by a bunch of Remainer fifth columnists working to undermine it. And all this seems to them to be part and parcel of a wider plot involving most of the world's scientists  - presumably working for dark forces - to use what they assume to be fake science to gain control over us and destroy our freedoms. All of which is reinforced in their own minds by increased levels of public censure for phobic views.

We see them on this forum all the time, calling the EU the EUSSR, saying that we are on the road to a Soviet dictatorship, that anyone saying unwelcome things will be put in gulags, that freedom of speech is dying if not dead. Even as they say these things with total freedom and failing to recognise the irony in that fact.

It is difficult to debate sensibly with people believing in fake realities that exist only in their own heads, so we will often end up ridiculing instead. Yet so convinced are they by their fake realities that they genuinely see those of us who believe in reality, the real thing,  as delusional for failing to see it their way.

This is making sensible debate very difficult, even in the mind zone. And I thought it worthwhile possibly to have a debate about this problem itself.

No doubt a few of them will show up soon to tell me how deluded I am, or that I am being wilfully dishonest, as they double down on their conspiracy theories. With links to "evidence" of varying degrees of dubiousness, often the outpourings of their fellow conspiracy theorists, sometimes quoting dodgy science. And recently one of their heroic truth tellers, because she is telling them what they want to hear, is - of all people - Mad Nad, Nadine Dorries - who is also herself seemingly detached from reality and a rather intellectually challenged conspiracy theorist. She too cannot believe that everything she ever believed in is turning out to be a crock of shit without invoking conspiracy theories to explain it

When facts change and assumptions based on them turn out to be wrong, sensible people change their opinions.

Less sensible ones invoke conspiracy theories in order to carry on thinking that they were right all along, and in order to somehow explain all that has gone wrong.

There seems to be a lot of this happening on the right today.

I expect some of them will be along soon to call me an idiot, delusional, someone who is part of their chosen conspiracy against them and the country, an extremist, far this or far that.

But the greatest threat to democracy is people voting on the basis of fake conspiracy theories that have little to do with reality at all.