Sorry if the premise is inflammatory, but I’ve been stymied by this for a while. How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country? I get it - not everything is bad now, and not everything was good then. FDR’s internment camps, etc.
That said - our country seems to be at a low point in intellectualism and accountability. The DHHS head is an antivaxxer, the deputy chief of the DOJ is a far-right podcast nutball, etc. Their supporters seem to have no nuance to their opinion beyond “well, Trump said he’d fix the economy and I don’t like woke.”
Have people always been this unserious and unquestioning, or are we watching the public’s sanity unravel in real time? Or am I just imagining some idealistic version of the past that never existed, where politicians acted in good faith and people cared about the social order?
Targeted, systematic attacks on education, and a robust propaganda networks ran by billionaires.
S O C I A L M E D I A M A N I P U L A T I O N.
My dude I grew up in a cult in Statesia. Unserious and not allowed to question is my childhood.
Pro-business/anti-regulation types teamed up with the anti-abortion types around 50 years ago in order to get votes for their unpopular ideas, then they did everything they could to conflate the two ideologies to where Christians (the dominant religious group) now think Republican=Christian=Republican and thus ALL Republican ideas intrinsically align with their religion. I.e., Jesus was a capitalist rather than anything that’s actually in the bible.
Tl;Dr: propaganda and the natural human tendency toward in-group bias.
Ever since the lead in gas…
America is at new records of stupid.
I’d argue we aren’t at a new level of stupid, we just lost our stupid originality
We are tho. Education today is not what it was in your day or your parents day. People are literally getting dumber by the generation as education continues to erode away.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
-Isaac Asimov, 1980
That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth: It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." -George Carlin
Ach, beat me to it.
No. Education has been under attack for the last 50 years.
For every generation that goes by education gets worse and worse. People are literally getting dumber as a result.
It’s all in the republican playbook. The dumber people are the easier they are to control. That’s how dick wads like Trump get into office.
Every country has enough gullible people to vote for a professional liar with a Hollywood face.
Especially one that has a early onset dementia
Increased blood lead level in children has been correlated with decreases in intelligence, nonverbal reasoning, short-term memory, attention, reading and arithmetic ability, fine motor skills, emotional regulation, and social engagement. … The effect of lead on children’s cognitive abilities takes place at very low levels.
High blood lead levels in adults are also associated with decreases in cognitive performance and with psychiatric symptoms such as depression and anxiety.
Lead poisoning # By organ system - Wikipedia
https://www.co2.earth/monthly-co2 <- 427 ppm
Nice PSA for understanding the world around us.
In my experience, all the Gen X people I’ve ever met were smart and kind people. It’s often the Boomers who are total assholes.
Yeah, gen x is by far and away the best generation (saying this as a millenial).
It’s a typical nationalist-authoritarian pipeline that can sadly happen to any country - but it’s only now that people get to realize their islands of democracy are no exception.
You either get vigilant early on - or get to reap the consequences. This machine doesn’t show its head before it is already too late to alter this route in the near future.
As a westerner who lived in Asia for the past 2 decades I have unusual take on this.
Americans generally aren’t more stupid than anyone else but they have no face saving culture which acts as a useful bottleneck on social and information exchanges. Because of this Americans can easily subscribe and announce their beliefs even if theyre low effort conspiracies because they are not afraid of losing face for believing in something stupid.
Combined that with information flow that is too fast for most to even comprehend let alone keep up with means that Americans are quick to believe lies and don’t feel punished for doing so.
This is very different in face saving cultures like Asia where if you say or do something stupid you’ll have strong social consequences and even spiritual/religious ones if you’re a Buddhist.
The caveat here is why Europeans are a bit better than this? I’m not sure i hadn’t lived there for a while but I’d imagine that smaller countries are less susceptible to this issue as they can correct quicker and I think Europe does have a bit of face saving culture, well definitely more than the US.
TL;DR: Americans are stupid because they are shameless
The Netherlands is tiny and has a right wing extremist government full of very, very stupid people. In fact, the Dutch version of The Onion sued the minister of foreign affairs because it’s impossible to distinguish between what she says and what they come up with.
This comment hits hard. There are a lot of ignorant people in my life that spout idiotic stuff and I brush it off, I disengage. I could take the time to listen, converse and correct but I don’t. I disengage, I brush it off as just “Oh boy, there goes crazy Joe rambling again! But generally he’s a good guy so I’ll tolerate it”. I need to start taking the time to push back and correct people I care about so they understand people are judging them when stupid things are said. Thank you!
Something people are discussing but not enough is America and the world’s refusal to diagnose and medicate mental illness.
Crazy Joe may just need meds.
The caveat here is why Europeans are a bit better than this?
The European countries had their own wave of fascism and dictatorship in recent centuries. Some seem to have leaned from the experience.
Maybe part of it is the whole “greatest country on earth” stuff as well. In other words, a lack of humility
In the European countries I’ve lived in, pride like that wasn’t really encouraged. And if you’re too boastful or what not to the point of arrogance, you tend to get the stink eye
And this applies to patriotism as well. Here in Norway for example, despite us having a stronger claim for stuff like “greatest country”, very few people, if any, really feel like being “proud” of one’s own country is something that one should be doing, or it being honorable at all. The best I see is that people enjoy living here and, if they see another Norwegian out there or Norway mentioned, they just get happy to see a fellow Norwegian, just because we are relatively small
Honestly, most Norwegians I’ve met complain about Norway’s problems more often than not lmao, despite, all things considered, you can hardly find better countries to live in, except some other European ones depending on your own preferences
There really is just, no culture of like, arrogance. Something that I feel like is very different to the US with its super heavy emphasis on individual capitalistic success
Maybe that’s a large part of it as well. A consequence of American culture being so extremely individualistic
Wow you putting it like that:
TL;DR: Americans are stupid because they are shameless
That’s literally it. You are so right.
I cannot count the amount of times that “annoying uncle/dad” is spewing racist/sexist/uneducated bullshit and everyone in the family feels like they just have to let them say it.
We really need to normalize pointing out stupid pov’s with harmful consequences.
This also reminds me of the common experience in the US of some random white dude with a megaphone screaming “Jesus saves blablabla” in public places. Why the fuck do we deal with that shit?
“My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
- Isaac Asimov, sarcastically making a point
The religious ones
I’m willing to bet one of the largest factors is the isolation we now live in. We used to have third places on every corner, we interacted with our neighbors, and public transport made us connect during commutes. We also relied on talking to people for most of our news and information and generally just were forced to be part of a community, or multiple.
Now we drive alone in a car to work, drive alone back to our house that’s isolated from others and don’t speak to neighbors, we have no third places left, and we get all our information from the internet or TV. Most people don’t have a community larger than a handful of close friends. We can’t organize and we don’t see the struggles other people are going through or help each other out. There’s no social bonds, and everyone only looks out for themselves.
I order to progress, we need to figure out how to form communities again. We need to be able to organize. This is all constructed to keep us thinking about ourselves as an individual rather than the collective us. We think about what I can do, which is pretty minor, not what we can do, which is almost anything we want.
I was raised in a rural area. The amount of friends I made in life after forty years is…zero. Aside from a sibling, I don’t have anyone to count on. I am also too poor to afford visiting bars or other social things, so I can’t learn how to be around people, let alone establish ties. It is my belief that America’s shitty economy is the source of these issues, because a person can’t blossom if they don’t have the fiscal agency to escape a tiny bubble.
The internet let me develop as a person, but that can only go so far. I can’t afford risks, such as trying beer, an escort to lose my virginity, or travel. Poverty is a prison without walls.
That sucks. If I were you I’d try to move to somewhere more dense and it could help you out. I know, easier said than done. You can try applying for jobs online and maybe get lucky though.
Good luck out there!
The internet should help with this, but we need to run our own stuff and not use corpo websites
To an extent, but it isn’t a replacement. Talking to random strangers online is not the same as talking to real local people.
They buy into propaganda very easily, also being complacent all the time made them somewhat selfish and arrogant. Also right wing propaganda against anything sounding “socialist” even though there is no true left in the USA, everyone is right wing in America, magats are the furthest right , the rest are just center right
