I've felt like I've been living in an orthogonal reality from the official 'reality for years now; since well before covid, although of course that accelerated and accentuated things.
My take is that, some time ago, lies started to become mandatory. A brief list of the required shibboleths, from before 2020:
- race isn't real, all human groups are exactly the same, all outcome differences are due to racism
- western civilization is iremediably white supremacist
- there is no psychological difference between the sexes, all outcome differences are due to sexism
- there is an infinite spectrum of genders
- climate is regulated entirely by carbon dioxide, and we are facing an imminent catastrophe due to human carbon emissions
There are of course far more lies that are widely believed (fat causes heart disease; meat is unhealthy; Jesus existed; etc etc) but the above list just covers those beliefs that cannot be violated without severe social and/or economic sanction.
The direct consequence of that list has been a reduction in competence (due to affirmative action/diversity policies), social fracturing (by fomenting conflict on the basis of immutable characteristics), and a reduction in living standards (due to counterproductive 'green' economic policies).
In 2020, the list grew to include anything related to covid and vaccines. The result was a dramatic reduction in human freedom, extensive damage to people's health, destruction of trust in institutions, and vast economic damage leading to a further reduction in living standards.
Now the list has grown to include a sober understanding of geopolitics and foreign policy, with likely results including global economic depression, fracturing of the internet into the 'splinternet', and great power war with the possibility of a nuclear exchange.
There is an important lesson here for humanity. Turning away from reality and embracing lies inevitably degrades conditions within reality. The more extensive the lies, the worse things become, because the actions taken will be increasingly in conflict with reality.
Further, while it is certainly possible for an individual or group to temporarily increase their power by encouraging lies, in the long run they destroy the basis of their own power.
The split is not between those who know reality vs those who don't; to claim we know what is real would be hubris. It's between those who care about getting closer to the truth by rejecting that which they know to be false, vs those who do not prioritize truth but hold something else - power, social acceptance - to be more important. So it isn't exactly a reality split (that's impossible, there's only ONE reality), so much as a perception split driven by a priority split.
But indeed, things have reached such a pass where communication with those on the other side of the widening epistemic gulf has grown essentially impossible.