Might be experiencing a bit of an existential crisis. Or maybe everyone really is as shitty as they seem?
Younger X here ('79), and this is something that I've been experiencing for maybe the last ~5+ years. Though a big part of me can see that the common denominator here is me, and maybe I'm just fucked in the head... but I'm having a really hard time squaring this circle.
Initially, it was as simple as noticing too many people with really stupid and ignorant fucking ideas about society, government, and how people just live amongst each other. I'd hear or read garbage from people about how they think somebody else was thinking or should think, about the broad social contract or just normal vanilla living in modern society. Like, can you not for a fucking second understand that a person doesn't see things the same as you? Is that possibility not anywhere on your radar?
But then, I start seeing entire movements and successful corporate endeavors built explicitly around this ignorance-fueled tribalism. That, in and of itself isn't entirely unique, but what's been new for me is people remarking about how this is apparently normal, inevitable, and irreversible. Like, "yes, humans are incapable of seeing eye to eye or having civil disagreement. That's how it always has been and always will be." And nobody even seems to fucking consider for a fucking second that people with opposing ideas are anything but the stupidest scum on the planet, and they immediately begin the work of dehumanizing them in obvious ways.
I mean, so far it felt like a predictable outcome of the addictive, divisive and omnipresent tech that nobody seems to be able to peel their faces away from, though I've been caught off guard by just how deeply it's twisted people's personalities. And I mean people I've known for decades and have deep bonds with... Their entire personality has been manipulated and they'll make statements about other humans, about how fucking shit they are for one reason or another, with zero information. And fucking God forbid you point out that a person doesn't have enough information to make such a claim. You'd think I was murdering babies in their living room.
This latest development for me has been people I look up to, and have built nontrivial parts of my worldview on the ideas or opinions from... Some of them are famous, some are just people I know and look up to... But SO many of them seem to be revealing themselves to have simply stupid ideas about the world and other people in it, that approximate some of those same dehumanized views. Just stating ignorant and trivially disprovable ideas about other people, groups of people, classes of people, countries. Like, literally middle-school levels of ignorance.
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that the the human race as a whole is actively and aggressively dehumanizing its own idea of itself, generally to make money without really knowing why, but also to hide from every scary reality about existence that each member of this fucking doomed species has historically dealt with in far more reasonable ways, but now appears to not have the balls to come to terms with even a bit. Like, hating has become the escape hatch for thinking about the reality that you're imperfect and are going to die one day.