The "Cartesian Crisis" describes the inability to be sure of anything—scientific claims, the basic facts of historical events, or the degree to which a consensus is actually accepted by others. It leads to the collapse of reason itself.

This is a completely new state of mind for humans to be living in.

In the past, most people had one, or maybe at most, a few sources of "truth." In the absence of any dissenting voices, they accepted what they were told as fact. As the old saying goes, whether what you believe is actually true or false doesn't matter much in terms of happiness... Ignorance after all is bliss.

Now there are so many dissenting voices, we have absolutely no way to know for sure what is real. The lack of certainty of just about anything... has created a vacuum which insanity has collapsed into and exploded. Big old flaming poop bomb, and the carp is now everywhere.

Discuss OT:

There is only one source of Truth in the world.

I think the effect your highlighting is mostly in online culture.

The dead internet theory is interesting. Basically, the premise is that AI will create so much garbage content online that eventually the internet will become useless. It's getting that way already very quickly.

This ^^^^^^

Great, settle everything for us then. What does that source say on the Kenedy assassination? The moon landing? UFO's? Epstein? Big foot? MRNA vaccines? Ivermectin? Autism? Hunters Laptop? What is a woman? The winner of tonight's Debate? Who was D.B. Cooper? The stolen election? And of course, the big tamale... where is Jimmy Hoffa buried?

some would say those are not important questions.

I think this is close to the truth. I used to be skeptical of a lot of what I read on the internet. Now I trust nothing I read and very little of what I see. It’s entertaining to see, but it’s not a reliable source of any real information.

Yes, many concerns about AI, including garbage content and deep fakes so real they become impossible to identify as fabricated... that will make just about anything digital useless in terms of evidence. I've sometimes wondered if we could see a resurgence in old time film in certain instances, otherwise it becomes impossible to know if what you are looking at is real.

I think you asked the wrong question with your OP. The answer to your OP question is obvious... we have to restore trust in institutions. The real question is how do we do that?

There seems to be something about institutions that make them susceptible to things like the woke mind virus. How is it that the smartest people in the world, like at harvard, can get so many things wrong? I don't know what the answers are but I know this is where the problem lies.

My thought on a solution stems from acknowledgement of the problem. If we know that institutions start to have problems like DEI and such when they reach a certain size... maybe we need to start engineering our institutions to stay small. This ends up butting heads with the greed of the individuals running those institutions. The people who gain power in them, want more power, so they grow in size to achieve that and the growth is where the problems arise. I'm just rambling at this point, yall should stop me when I ramble...

For the first time, and always going forward, we have millions of loud dissenting voices that are going to make it impossible to ever trust the institutions again.

It's easy to trust institutions when they are the only show in town. That'll never be the case again.