Then that’s a sign that Fox news (or whatever source) isn’t a useful source. That’s where people need to get their heads straight. Trying to fact check unsourced claims is a sucker’s game - it’s easier to make a BS claim than to fact check it, especially when the claims are produced by a billion-dollar propaganda machine.

It can be hard to identify experts, and sometimes experts are still being told what to say by others, so you actually need to identify independent experts. Sometimes we rely on institutional endorsement to identify experts, but that relies on the institutions themselves being independent and being primarily focused on promoting expertise. There are other ways to identify experts, but they can be difficult to apply until you have a lot of experience with experts. There are a lot of people out there who feign expertise – for instance, it’s common for conspiracy theorists to write long books with lots of footnotes. I’m afraid that the new generative AI systems will make in much easier to feign expertise.

One general rule is to get as much information as possible from true experts - people who work on the specific subject that they are discussing, at least in broad fields of knowledge (e.g. history, biology, computers, law). Don’t rely on a single person or team of people to be your one-stop-shop for information. As much as possible, the experts should be independent of each other. While a historian and a biologist may both work at universities, and you may learn about both of them from a reporter, they likely do not have daily contact with each other and likely have not ever met… but stay aware of ‘where they are coming from’. When an interesting topic is raised, be willing to track down the original source and learn more directly from them.

Get information from sources that treat you seriously. For instance both NPR and the Economist both focus on in-depth reporting about a wide variety of topics. In contrast, TV news tends to be full of fluff. Ignore fluff peddlers. Ignore those who talk in circles about today’s minor scandal or “breaking story”, and instead focus on those who give you information that will still be useful a year from now.

Before you can check facts, you need to know what are reliable sources. This is a long term process. If I need to go to one place, Wikipedia is a good starting point to get ‘all sides’ of a topic (usually), with links to primary sources.

A long term strategy is to build general background knowledge rather than relying on case-by-case fact checking. Especially science and history. If you have that knowledge, a lot of the spin becomes immediately obvious, and you quickly identify who is worth listening to (of course, you need to first find reliable sources for history and science, and not get caught in partisan echo chambers. Just don’t turn to politicians and TV pundits for your history lessons).

I like academics because they mainly communicate with other experts and know they can’t get away with BS, while TV hosts and politicians mainly communicate with people who are easy to fool.

My impression is that 1/3 of the population is always ready to accept tyranny. On that topic, I have a couple of other suggestions that are easier reads than Arendt, and specifically about the usa:

1. Who Goes Nazi (a short, almost fun essay)
2. Huey Long is sometimes considered America’s fascist governor.

Breathable air. For now.

If you are up for a big, dense piece of 1950s social philosophy, Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” is a classic. It covers imperialism, racism, mob violence, antisemitism, propaganda, tolerance for lies, and the development of mythologies. It’s got a lot of ideas - many of which have been challenged. It’s also excessively wordy. One thing to keep in mind is that most of the components have been around for a long time – supremacist ideologies, conspiracy theories, propaganda systems.

Perhaps the first thing was realizing that this is my life and it’s up to me how to live it – ‘society’ doesn’t get to put any demands on me, and my life will be what it will be. With that being said, I probably lucked out to have parents who gave me opportunities without imposing burdensome expectations, and studying philosophy helped me to not follow them down paths that I thought were misguided, even when they put some mild pressure on me. Books are always a good way to realize that you aren’t the only one with these doubts and ideas.

Second, is I have a decent job, which gives me some economic and social status. In some ways this was straight forward for me – I was always studious and there always seemed to be some sort of obvious opportunity ahead of me that I was ready to pursue. There were several times when I seriously doubted the path I was on and felt a lot of anxiety, but things worked out eventually.

I don’t have everything I want, and I see a lot of places I could improve in my time management and interpersonal interactions, but I feel pretty stable overall.

If you are interested in continuing to discuss Stoicism, I’m currently studying it and made a Lemmy community for discussion https://yall.theatl.social/c/philosophy_of_life