Canada

Indeed. It seems the reason people are becoming vulnerable to such manipulation is because civil discourse has deteriorated. Manipulative politicians, concentrated media perspective, outdated educational models, lack of information sharing from academia to the general public, increasing isolation and segregation within communities, all of these factors (and probably more) play a role in cultivating and weaponizing ignorance among a population.

All of us need to talk about the real reasons why more and more politicians are corrupted; why we only get a limited-range, highly-curated point of view and overly-simplified bullet points (which all make it easy to mislead people), instead of actual policy debate in the media; and why when there IS a specific policy discussion, increasing numbers of people lack so much context that they can be flat out lied to and manipulated, just like that. These people aren't losing intelligence (though they might be shutting it off for a while so it looks like it). Their reality is being disconnected from everyone else's outside of their perspective, to an extent that makes it self-reinforcing (but not necessarily impossible to deconstruct).

I don't think anybody overtly did it in this topic, but I keep seeing and hearing people blaming individuals for succumbing to society-wide problems that might need society-wide interventions. Recently, I can't remember where, but I saw someone make an interesting case that left or moderate people shunning or cutting off right-wing family members and friends is fuelling this as well. (Note: they just meant people who frustrate or annoy you a lot and not those who also would actively harm your mental health-- such people absolutely should be avoided for health reasons.)

We need some individualism and some collectivism for a society to work, much like there should be within a functional family. An extreme of either one without the other would be intolerable for the vast majority. Obviously even with a mix, there can be disagreements on where we should be more individualistic/collectivist and what the overall balance should be (or if it even needs to stay the same).

*edits for grammar/readability

Rather than the most engagement, it's starting to become the emotion that creates any engagement at all.

Political apathy has gotten pretty ingrained in the democratic world, let alone here in Canada. And frankly, I can't blame anybody when it feels like even going out to the polls is a lose-lose situation. Not a single viable candidate you really want to back means that why should you even bother to show up to vote? No matter who gets in the seat, they'll screw over the majority of the population and hold back any of the real change that's needed to actually fix any of the prevalent problems that hurt not only the regular folk, but the economy, health, safety, and any number of other things that make a good and prosperous country.

This isn't China, yet why does it sometimes feel like the upper echelons are growing to more and more resemble the CCP? Or the oligarchy of Russia?