Every country suffers from this, America is just the most rich due to geographic benefits and the Bretton Woods system.
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aesthelete@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Read the book “bowling alone” if you’re interested in someone’s attempt at researching why we went from collectivism to individualism as a country. There are a large amount of factors but if I were to take a crack at it, I’d list a few: TV, the Internet, smart phones, air conditioning, capitalism, and (last but certainly not least) racism. Racism is foundational to the country and its history.
As far as the stupidity, some of the same factors apply, but there are also additional ones like environmental factors (US citizens eat more microplastics than any other major country since like 2016 and we lead poisoned ourselves for a century), a deep-seeded anti-intellectualism, and we’re a large part cultist/religious idiots that see everything through the lense of “some guy” being the best thing ever and the source of all truth.
turnip@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
aesthelete@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Every country suffers from what? Mass stupidity?
Maybe that’s true but it certainly seems like we are more individualistic and stupid than most…and I don’t think those two things are entirely unrelated.
turnip@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Are you familiar with the elders of zion, which was believed by a huge number of people all over the globe, even though it was totally ridiculous. The average person is not smart.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
At one point, it seemed like we were getting smarter, and then it very didn’t.
slackassassin@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Lead was used in Europe too, and is still used by some member states. If there’s anything we know about micro plastics, it’s that they are ubiquitous. What we don’t know is what effects, if any, they have on health/cognition.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
America is more car-oriented than most other western countries and leaded gas is how we did the majority of our poisoning.
Yes, of course microplastics are everywhere, but I’ve read studies saying that internationally they’re eating about the same amount of plastic as we did years ago, but they kind of plateaued whereas here in the good ol USA people still don’t know that it’s not a good idea to eat three meals a day of microwaved food cooked in plastic containers.
SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Unless you can show any research done that indicates micro plastics influence intelligence I wouldn’t be using that as an answer to this.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, I’m a hunching it up a bit. But there’s some amount of absurdity in expecting large amounts of scientific rigor in lemmy comments when those leading purportedly scientific bodies are being led by vaccine-denying simpletons.
That ubiquitous expectation of powerless individuals to reason and behave perfectly while ultra-powerful people can behave like spoiled five year olds is foundational in making life fucking miserable for me personally.
nodiratime@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Driving in a car/metal box instead of sharing the space or walking/cycling and connecting to others is another one.
Othering of others is super easy in a car. There are studies about how much more violent and vitriolic people are when driving.
turmacar@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah lack of third spaces and class mixing is big. Everyone is segregated into their own existing (shrinking) in groups, that then get concentrated by the webiverse.
The 70s oil crisis was an inflection point for Europe and a lot of cities/countries started moving back away from cars as the sole transportation option but the US didn’t have the same reaction.
AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Not to mention the rise of vehicle violence, running over protesters and such.