There’s a remarkable separation going on amongst the rank-and-file citizens right now, into mutually-distrusting cliques, simply unable to speak reasonably to each other about a whole lot of crucial matters. Cuts across families, and old, long-established friendships. The sheep and goats categorisation that I favour captures something of it: radically different responses to exactly the same subjects. What it seems to come down to is the forced sorting of individual psychologies into those who seem to need to believe people presented as authority figures, and those who question and stay naturally sceptical about anything - whoever says it.
I had a remarkably sharp example of it yesterday, in conversation with an old friend. One of those incidents which you may have seen commentators describe quite a bit lately, where you can’t establish any agreed set of - fairly likely - facts, and you end up just agreeing to differ; or you fall into a hectic shouting match, just throwing assertions at each other.
The astonishing thing for me was the way my friend was regurgitating recent talking-point bollocks pushed out by the propaganda machine, and - as people have pointed out with some surprise in other anecdotes like this - the propaganda victims don’'t seem to notice that they didn’t work this out for themselves, and they are in fact repeating talking points which have been inserted into their minds by the machine; literally word for word, as in this case yesterday.
I had noticed for a week or two that my friend seemed to be getting unusually obsessed with the idea that the upcoming US POTUS ‘election’ just must, absolutely had to, work out with the removal of Trump. Apparently because, in her captured imagination, he was the ultimate awful being, from whom we simply MUST be saved! (She’s an avid follower of BBC ‘news’…)
In the course of our conversation, I mentioned that this election seems - from lots of signs, clearly visible - to be particularly ripe with obvious vote-swindling rackets. P immediately came out with the exact phrases that I’d been hearing from the BBC (the 3-minute bulletinettes on R3, which is all of the beeb’s ‘news’ output that I can stand, and even then I’m constantly rewording their headlines as I listen, to try to make them objectively honest). “Trump said so, but it was unsubstantiated”, she said; and “he presented no evidence”. Both factually false statements, and both exactly as the beeb mediawhores - and the rest - had worded them. And apparently the hopeless superannuated crook Biden was an excellent and decorous replacement. Biden…! (This is a civilised, humane, fairly radically-inclined woman, but… well, shall we just say she’s had a rather sheltered, haut-bourgeoisie life… 
)
And of course, when you point out to the troobleevers that they’re regurging current lamestream talking points verbatim, they get annoyed, and the whole thing quickly becomes shouty.
P, it turns out, is also persuaded that ‘Putin’ - meaning Russians - was behind the recent Navalny incident, and he - Navalny - is ‘the opposition’, with his paltry 2% opinion-poll backing. As you might expect, P has no idea about how Russian politics works these days, knowing only the Western lamestream discourse about it. And yes, ‘Putin’ was behind the Skripal scam too, and no, it wasn’t a scam but a genuine, deeply-irresponsible releasing of the universe-killing Russian horror ‘novichok’ on British streets. And ‘Putin’ has just made himself president for life too, the tyrant (this being - in reality - the constitutional change that Russia has just made, by an apparently spotlessly-clean referendum, voted in by about two thirds of the Russian electorate…) Note added 9.37 PM, 12 NOV 20: This alteration gave Putin the right to stand again for President. It didn’t make him ‘pres-for-life’. Election by his compatriots remains the requirement.
We discussed authoritative information sources. And this, it seems, is where the separation into mutually isolated factions happens. P simply can’t handle the idea that there are - literally - zero informants who should be trusted 100%. Absolutely all should be held in some scepticism, habitually, across the entire lamestream, but also across the whole of the internet as well. Bald assertions don’t cut it; established evidence is what swings the truth.
No, no! Some sources you can trust! Me saying that beeb ‘news’ or the Fraudian are thoroughly untrustworthy perception-manipulation operations brings on immediate cognitive dissonance in such vulnerable spirits, and causes them to become instantly agitated.
In the end, we had to agree to stop talking about it, as the situation teetered on the edge of an outright row. People’s sense of who they really are, and what is really solid, established truth, seems to have become somewhat fragile lately. Malign effects of TDS…
The same gulf seems to be in place between those who see the current gaderene rush for an inadequately-tested, and therefore inherently unsafe ‘anti-covid vaccine’ as an obvious criminally-irresponsible money-grubbing racket, with more autocratic power-grabbing lurking just behind it, and those Terror-Derangement Syndrome victims who simply can’'t wait to get it, on pure, terror-driven trust. It will be good when these Interesting Times have burned themselves out, and we can get back to having normal psychological responses to the world again, and actually talking about things constructively.
