LET'S TRAVEL FOUR YEARS INTO THE FUTURE

Let's try a little thought experiment. Let's say you wake up and it's december 2020. First thing you do is you run to a pile of "old" newspapers in order to catch up on world events from 2016 to 2020.

And as you browse through the pile, it gradually dawns upon you that nothing major has really changed. Some people's lives got a little better, other's a little worse. There was the amount of natural disaster and mayhem you'd expect. It is now 0.09 degrees warmer outside on average.

But you mostly discover that the United States are, by and large, in a state comparable to 2016. The rich are still way too rich, the poor still need to work full-time just not to starve, everybody's obsessed with celebrity culture and entertainment. City people act all smug about country people; country people are angry that the system leaves them feeling stranded.

Donald Trump? Heh. He's mostly considered an okay president, a not-quite Reagan. His critics accuse him of flip-flopping on everything; his supporters praise his flexibility and ability to A-B test. His approval rating is 32%, and he's not going to run for a second mandate because he's tired and wants to spend more time with his family.

And that's it. The Republican party in power for the last 4 years hasn't done anything way out of the ordinary. They signed some dubious deals, and some great ones too. Immigration is a little bit different, minorities still get shafted in some ways, but no hecatomb or civil war or anything.

Would your mind be blown? It's shouldn't be, because after all, you're not an expert on politics; you don't know at all what's going on behind the scenes. You can barely make out a picture of what's going on on the public stage because the media are completely biased and untrustworthy. You have no notion of how teams of cognitive scientists work behind the curtain to shape public opinion. You're moslty ignorant about any notion of persuasion and large-scale communication. You're drowning in an ocean of information, misinformation and disinformation, and you have no way of sorting out what matters and what doesn't in that ocean.

Now let's travel back to 2012. I come up to you and I say "Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States."

Would your mind be blown? It's shouldn't be, because after all, you're not an expert on politics; you don't know at all what's going on behind the scenes, and you can barely make out a picture of what's going on on the public stage because the media are completely biased and untrustworthy. You have no notion of how teams of cognitive scientists work behind the curtain to shape public opinion. You're moslty ignorant about any notion of persuasion and large-scale communication. You're drowning in an ocean of information, misinformation and disinformation, and you have no way of sorting out what matters and what doesn't in that ocean.

(TL;DR for those of you who need the Tweet format : the concept of Trump being a perfectly fine president is as "unthinkable" now as the concept of him being elected was 4 years ago because we the public don't know shit.)