People can habituate to democratic decline

This article by two authorities, a neuroscientist and a well-known political philosopher, draws attention to a phenomenon that has not been given much attention precisely because of interdisciplinarity: the habituation of the brain to social environments that are progressively sliding towards authoritarian societies. The argumentation is solid, and this is precisely what is most alarming about the article.

The authors point to empirical evidence of brain habituation and the generation of biases when there is a constancy of authoritarian phenomena that progressively elicit less reaction. This is similar, on a less worrying scale, to how in a park where litter is not picked up, there is a progressive tendency not to take care of littering, whereas the opposite occurs when the park is well-maintained and clean. The authoritarian phenomena cited by the authors refer to the drifts in the United States, where multiple cases of the degradation of democratic life are accumulating.

It is particularly important to note how these phenomena start with an epistemic habituation: polarisation, accumulation of fake news, persistent distrust of expert opinion, etc. The progressive creation of biases in the perception of anti-democratic facts is probably a threshold of bad return. Unfortunately, daily evidence leads us to suspect that the authors' analysis can be extrapolated to most societies, including our own, where, by the way, we would need a similar analysis.