> I don't understand why people love the nanny state so much. We can't continue to make companies be the police, the stewards of truth, and justice. They demonstrated just recently, during COVID, that this was an absolute disaster. Over the last 30 years we have watched freedom erode because the average American wants to foist all responsibility onto someone else.
I think there is a couple of things at play:
First, negativity bias. I think it's pretty clear that as a society we're not that interested in harm reduction, just biased towards harm reduction of things that violate our value system. So when things happen that do violate our norms, they're presented outside of the background noise. For example, very few people feel compelled to come in and share personal anecdotes of how they lost relatives to a car accident when the topic at hand is vehicles in america. Yet they're the second leading cause of death from unintentional injuries.
Second, these things affect people across the social stratification index. People of privilege experience it. I claim that we also as a society are not very concerned with protecting vulnerable populations. The top 10% of the nations families hold 60% of the wealth, while 1 in 10 Americans live in poverty. We consistently rank lower in social welfare compared to other developed nations. So, further supporting the first point, it's even more outlandish when these things happen to people who are not accustomed to having bad things happen.
Finally, technology consistently outpaces our ability to reason about and structure our society as a whole. It's easier to attempt blanket and ham fisted reactions to these bad things we see without understand the wider implications.
To a lot of people, the easiest and most obvious choice is Authoritarianism, because in there mind there's no other way to stop the pain.
Plus, it's difficult to talk about these things without being callous. "Bad things happened to me, so you should simply give up your right to privacy so we can prevent it from happening further." At face value is difficult to take seriously, but when it involves that cross section of the privileged vulnerable class, it's difficult to have a reasonable argument without being steamrolled.