Think of it as “throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks”. That is the role of intellectuals or pundits, whatever you want to call the class that disseminates ideology / PR. There are lots of them and they spout all sorts of crazy stuff. Now basically it’s like the theory of evolution through natural selection. Except as individuals we are intelligent and can make decisions like “oh that sold clicks” or “oh that helped pass that law”. Who decides that? Well those who work for those that own everything and who see it as their job to increase profit.

So basically ideology is like a secretion of a specialized class that is filtered and selected to “work”.

So my theory is that after decades of wealth transfer and increasing inequality, dwindling middle class and lowering of effective quality of life, you need “stronger secretions” to control the masses. Because the old ideology doesn’t work any more. One word for it is late stage capitalism.

Another environmental aspect that plays into this I think is climate change - since we already failed to prevent what could result in our extinction or at least in countless genocides, what social contract remains? Why even pretend to be civilized when our civilization obviously has gone insane? Like a decadent indulgence in an orgy of hatred. Or just insanity like in “Don’t look up”.