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this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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It's mindblowing to us non-Americans that such a large percentage of a purportedly first-world country can be so utterly stupid. I can't imagine that things were this bad even just 20 years ago. Why are y'all so dumb?
Decades undermining and underfunding education. They want dumb consumers just informed enough to work a shit job and earn enough to survive but not thrive.
I have friends who are teachers, and the education policies in place even here in California are absolutely asinine. They are required to have extensive documentation to fail a student, in that kids who did fuckall that year are promoted to the next grade anyway. There are kids entering highschool are struggling with reading comprehension and basic arithmetic, nevermind have behavioral issues galore and just a general sense of apathy. Admin tend to side with insane parents instead of teachers in the classroom, exacerbating the behavior problems. It's all bad news bears.
Decades of propaganda painting opposition to the GOP as literal Satan worshipping baby killing pedophiles, and when that's who you're running against, how could not vote for the GOP no matter how uneducated they are?
i agree this is the main thing, plus social media. that’s a recipe for conspiracies to spread like wildfire. any asshat can make a spooky video and appear to know what they’re talking about, and people are not nearly skeptical enough. Not to mention algorithms designed to keep people clicking, tapping, and watching.
sure education is facing challenges but i don’t think it’s THAT much worse than a few decades ago. it just hasn’t been able to catch up with the propaganda and social media.
The attack on education is part of the long term strategy. The early indoctrination and propaganda gets people into the conspiracies and a lack of education makes sure they stay there and don't stop to consider how utterly batshit insane they sound. I also think lead exposure due to usage of leaded gas prior to 1996 can't be overlooked. There's a very obvious correlation in violent crime rates that corresponds with the increased usage of leaded gas in the 60s and the sharp decline in the 90s following its phasing out starting in the 80s and outright ban in the mid 90s.
yeah I'm not denying education is under attack. I just don't think it's anywhere close to the same level of responsibility for conspiracy thinking as propaganda and social media.
It's essentially a force multiplier. The propaganda wouldn't be anywhere near as effective as it is without the attacks on education. The propaganda was the thin end of the wedge, and now that they're established they're attacking education to make sure they stay entrenched, as it's the only thing that could really threaten them.
yeah I disagree, but I doubt either of us are going to find conclusive evidence one way or the other.
Yup. We are just eyeballs watching a screen to them. If they make us angry we engage more so ad revenue goes up. "They" is the media
I've usually pointed towards our education system but I'm not so sure anymore. I think there's more at play.
I think it's more about the inherit individualism in America, "the American dream", capitalism, and the definition of The United States. There's a strong rejection of community support and social services. There's a desire to have more than we need. There's a fear of "others" who threaten your domicile and prosperity. The country was founded on a distrust of government with the formation of semi-sovereign states and multiple forms of checks and balances.
I think there's an argument that to "be American" means to be in opposition to and skeptical of government. At first, in wake of the revolutionary war, this seemed reasonable. With slow moving news and a journalistic industry maintaining the fourth pillar of democracy, without the temptation of ad revenue or competition with social media, Americans were, frankly, sheep to a small group of organizations. As a 21st century first first world country, we really need to get together and reassess what the role of government should be and how to draft a constitution that meets the needs of a nation in an increasingly connected (and shrinking) planet.
We are not afforded the tools to be competitive with the future of humanity.
I actually believe our lack of faith in religion has had a negative impact. We used to be more connected with our community. We largely trusted one another. It was not that long ago that hitch hiking across the country was a normal practice for teens. I don't believe in gods but I have respect for some aspects of some religious organizations. What seems to have replaced this is social media bubbles or tribes. Or internet forums like this.
We're an increasingly fractured nation that holds distrust of all things in high regard.
Also, we're a nation that defines wealth as the ability to acquire rather than the ability to give.
There's also an apparent pride in anti intellectualism that seems to be typically American.
I noticed that in the early 1980s in elementary school. The best students got teased and bullied by others who weren't trying. It made no sense, if you don't want to learn that's on you but why try to hold others back?
I think that goes hand in hand with the attacks on education. They've painted themselves as being the voice of "working class" Americans and discredit experts that provide knowledge that runs counter to their propaganda as out of touch "liberal elites". It's truly ironic that they're implying that your average American is stupid with that statement and yet their supporters fully agree with it. They point to the correlation between higher education and disbelief in their propaganda as proof that the highly educated are wrong in a weird cyclic argument. Their stance is basically if the intellectuals don't agree with me, it's because they're wrong, not because I am.
Basically this:
I don't think it's because people are choosing to be dumb. Knowing how to do things because you learned the hard way, because you failed over and over, or because your father taught you how to do it is praised more in this group. Gumption and grit is valued more than being told by "the elite" about how you're supposed to do things. "Science ain't got nothing on how my grandady's done it".
It's really very sad. Some people are so anti-establishment that they'd sooner see their younger generations struggle to prosper than to send them off to a university to educate themselves to make abetter life for the future of their family. Let's not even consider how they've been brainwashed to believe "republicans" are anti-establishment and in favor of the working class.
What I don't understand is how easily people accept claims by random uncredited people on social media. It was not long ago that we all laughed at the people who took any cover of the National Inquirer remotely seriously.
Context and intent aside, what's the difference between this Hurricane Helene has brought a flood of AI photos and conspiracy theories to social media and this Bat Child Escapes!?
One point I disagree on is that the country was founded on distrust of government. I'd say rather it was founded on distrust of dictatorships and autocracy. From the outset it was designed in a way that attempted to distribute power in such a way that no single individual or group had absolute power. It was one of the reasons why several of the founders were highly skeptical of political parties and considered banning them outright but instead settled for voicing warnings about them. They feared that a single political party could eventually become dominant and become the de facto ruler of the country.
In recent years there has been an effort to re-frame distrust of autocracy into a general distrust of government. I believe this has been primarily driven by powerful business interests in an attempt to remove regulations that get in the way of their maximizing profits at the expense of the public. They have rather successfully hijacked the anti-communism propaganda of the 50s and 60s and twisted it into an anti-government propaganda.
The really weird move is how right-wing attitudes in the USA have gone from distrust of government and its "interference" in their lives, through distrust of autocracy, to strong support for fascist autocracy that would be highly oppressive and invasive into people's lives. The last step is astonishing.
Absolutely, but it's also easy to see how the change happened. The original goal was to prevent autocracy, so power was distributed and checks and balances were created to prevent any one person or branch from being able to have too much authority. The message was corrupted into distrust of all government and combined with the debunked trickle down capitalism theory (thanks Reagan) that wealthy companies would lead to a wealthy public. The GOP then ran on a platform of eliminating "corrupt government" and removing "government interference" that was supposedly preventing that sweet free market capitalism they had been promising from working and trickling down to everyone. This then allowed them to re-frame stripping regulations and power from various government bodies and centralizing it within the executive branch as removing "wasteful and corrupt government", and removing checks and balances as removing laws and regulations that "protected corrupt government officials".
This also explains the "he's not hurting the right people" crowd, as they were sold on the idea that the autocrats would be using their power to attack government institutions and politicians, not the public. They never bothered to follow things to their logical conclusion and ask "once you've established an autocrat, and removed all government regulations, what happens next?", with the obvious answer "you have a dictatorship".
That's a good analysis, and helpful. Thanks!
Another important point that occurred to me on reflection is why they can simultaneously hold the belief in their head at the same time that all politicians are corrupt, and yet still have complete faith in Trump. They treat politicians like they're some foreign species, like they're not just normal people. In their mind there's a clear distinction between "us", and "politicians". But they don't consider Trump to be a politician, they've internally classified him as "business man", hence he's not corrupt, because he's not a politician.
Thanks for this interesting and deeper take. I hadn't made that link between individualism and this phenomenon, but it seems very plausible because we see less of this in countries that aren't as antisocial.
Because the Republicans have spent the last 40 years slowly demolishing public education. That combined with a steady feed of propaganda on AM radio and Fox News, plus mild lead poisoning from leaded gas usage prior to the 90s has resulted in multiple generations that lack even the most rudimentary critical thinking skills or scientific knowledge and are primed to believe whatever absurd conspiracy reinforces whatever their pastors and favorite talking heads are saying.
They're absolutely convinced that the US government has been infiltrated by "communists" that are engaged in grand sweeping conspiracies to destroy the US, and the only solution is to remove all power from the US government. They've been steeped in propaganda for decades that tells them all governments are corrupt and only corporations can be trusted, that the "free market" is the solution to all problems.
20 years ago my country used to look up to the US educational system and tried to adopt their methodologies, I'm glad we didn't
Decades of FUD. It's the same strategy totalitarian regimes follow around the world. You don't expect people to believe this shit. You just need them to question reality enough so that they don't believe the truth.
One of our political parties discovered they can reliably achieve short term goals by politicizing facts and science. The success of this strategy points out that it's available to anyone who wants to use it, which over time has meant that group of voters just got continually flooded with nonsense, until we got here.
There's (almost) no one pushing back from that side - the strategy is too successful, the margins of victory for the party are too small, and most politicians in general want what's best for them and would put the long term health of the group they're representing as a distant priority, if at all.
Doesn't even really require coordination/cooperation. With enough people willing to employ this strategy for enough time, by now the distrust of science and official communications is extremely entrenched.
If you're looking for the "why" we're susceptible to it, it's the same old story - people angry at how things are going can often be manipulated into blaming people and things other than the true causes, with obvious advantages / incentives for those doing the manipulation.
Systemic regression of education priority + non-stop conspiratorial propaganda. I was born and grew up in the US and have seen the shift first-hand.
At least what you're seeing here is still just a very loud minority.
There were truthful realities that some people didn't like. Those realities were communicated by experts. Instead of people accepting those realities, there was an attack on experts. This happened in two ways:
Because there are now two groups calling themselves experts, and they are giving contradictory information, further loss of trust occurs. So the masses are picking and choosing which experts to listen to with whatever criteria they determine, and I'm not seeing a lot of informed decision making or critical thinking questioning sources.
Couple that with Clarke's proclamation: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
So our technology has evolved to do so many amazing things, those without understanding of the technology assume it can do so much more, and don't question things like "Dems control the weather".
So a whole bunch of us are dumb now.
this is the wrong question, The real question is:
See, the people believing this shit are the ones who, if being able to create a hurricane, would do it in an instant to harm their political opponents, so it makes sense to them others would do it. They would steal an election, they would get rid of elections once elected, they would pretend to be a shooting victim if paid enough money... Once you leave all morals behind and get on the me and my version of America first train, everything is possible and thinkable. It is not about "is this possible" or "can they do it" it is all about "if I could do it I would so they are doing it".
Oh, this is interesting, and it ties into the other comment about it being essentially antisocial behaviour.
Rupert Murdoch.
Several reasons that I know of and probably a lot more that I don't, but basically ignorance and lack of critical thinking skills.
Our educational system is underfunded and has cut a lot of things that used to be taught, like Civics/Government, so no one knows how things work and assume the only important office is the presidency, and that it has control over everything. Other subjects and extracurricular activities that help teach critical thinking like Speech/Interpersonal communication, Current Events, Logic, Debate, etc. have been dropped or cut back to only superficial coverage. Watch some old videos of schoolchildren being interviewed about various topics and you'll be amazed at how informed and thoughtful they were for their age back then compared to now (not to mention polite).
The information bubbles of social media and the algorithms that amplify disinformation on places like Facebook, X/twitter, YouTube, etc. They suck people deeper and deeper into rabbit holes of insanity. Foreign powers such as Russia, Iran, and other enemies of democracy exploit this by injecting and amplifying their own disinfo to sow anger and division.
and finally one of the worst offenders: FOX "News". Ever since this station started it has been a brainwashing tool. Most of the people you are talking about, who believe all this crap, especially the older ones who are more into TV watching are avid FOX news viewers, used to listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio and are also listening to people like Alex Jones and others like him. It all feeds on itself.
It’s just statistics, honestly. Greater population means greater number of dumb people. FYI, you can be rich and dumb, or college educated and dumb, too.
America also doesn’t implement strict control over information or discourse like other countries with greater populations, like China. The problem is that outside of gerrymandering America does have free and fair elections, which is why the greater swaths of “dumb” people can present an actual danger.
As an American southerner I don't appreciate your cultural appropriation
Blame English for lacking a proper 2nd person plural pronoun.
Yous think, aye?
You'uns disagree?
Tons of Russian ops too
Its contagious. There's fascist uprisings going on everywhere, not just in the US. I think a lot of "Trump supporters" we see online is astroturfing, making it seem he has more supporters than he does
US citizens have always been this dumb. But the Internet has made it cheap and easy for the idiots to gain a platform. The media was expensive 20 years ago and complicated so the idiots didn't have the skills to use it.