[deleted]
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
[deleted]
Submitted 3 weeks ago by Lawdoggo@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
Seleni@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
NeilBru@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
ACH, beat me to it.
coffeeisblack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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
HappySkullsplitter@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yes, they’ve always been here. There has always been more stupid ignorant people than educated and intelligent people.
Previously, the stupid had no platform.
The fire hose of stupid shit we are inundated with nowadays used to only trickle through in person.
Someone would say something insanely stupid to you at the bar, at the grocery store, at the barber shop etc… and all we had to do was ignore them or tell them to shut up
Thanks to social media, now they’ve teamed up and have millions of followers.
The question ought to be, How are the the educated and intelligent going to rise above it?
abbadon420@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Democracy might be the problem. You could put a threshold to vote in place, something to test that you know all the views from all the parties and the relevant topics. It’s a slippery slope though, because once you enable restrictions on voting, it’s hard to disable it again. If you accidentally get a Trump in power, he might just as easily restrict voting back to cis, white males only.
Condiment2085@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I was wondering if a top age restriction could be good though. People use to not live so damn long that they could fuck over the future generation.
Like shouldn’t people who will actually be alive to see the changes they are making make the decisions? Why are we letting people vote who are on their death bed, probably base their decisions on stuff from 50 years ago, and don’t really care about what the people who will actually live that reality will experience?
Not sure what the cutoff should be. But if 17 year olds aren’t old enough to vote, maybe 60+ year olds aren’t young enough to vote?
refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Democracy isn’t the problem; it’s the money in politics, which is an intended effect of capitalism.
Capitalism is the problem.
hihi24522@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I grew up in a small Utah town. The only four adults I ever remember hearing admit they were wrong especially when it came to politics or science or religion were my father and three of my high school teachers.
All the rest would literally tell me that the research papers and encyclopedias I tried to cite as evidence were made up by either satan or some government deep state conspiracy. Or they’d say we can “agree to disagree” about shit like animals feeling pain and the flaws in eugenics (I wish I was joking)
Yes, they have always been this stupid. Learning requires accepting when you’re wrong and the vast majority of people I knew growing up saw that as weakness.
I thought it would be different when I got out of that place, and while living in a larger city is better, it’s not better by all that much.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You forgot Satan. They also like to blame anything bad on Satan’s apparently limitless power and also Satan being so unbusy that they’d devoted time and energy into stealing your shoes.
MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
They literally mentioned that.
Xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Grew up in southern Idaho. Yeah that’s pretty much what I experienced growing up, too!
Wasn’t just admitting wrongness that was seen as weakness, though - honestly I came to find that most empathetic, society benefitting behaviors are spun and contorted into a weakness.
Ironic to me that, at least thru my eyes, spinning stuff like that into a “weakness” indicates to me that they’re avoiding the work they’d need to put in to be better… Which, is the real weakness here!
I think a significant portion of the problems in the US stems from a lack of willingness to work on themselves, aiming to minimize their impact on those around them (and thus themselves, through societal proxy). On the contrary, people install loud ‘mufflers’ to show they don’t give a fuck. Or leave carts outside the corral. Or scream at fast food workers, display flagrant racism, refuse to wear COVID masks - whatever.
Good ol Golden Rule really would solve it all, I think.
Kalysta@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
To be completely fair, something like 80% of the state of Utah belongs to a cult. You don’t see as much of this in coastal states.
drmoose@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
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
Condiment2085@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
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_IFAKs___gone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
- Isaac Asimov
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
starlinguk@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
czardestructo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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!
coffeeisblack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Bruncvik@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of 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
There were people warning against the glorification of ignorance in the US nearly half a century ago. It’s nothing new; it just reached critical mass (also thanks to social media where ignorant people can self-organise).
bradinutah@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
Excellent point about the ignorance. I would also add ingratitude. People look to whiners like the Donvict and think that complaining about first world problems is a legit reason to destroy founding principles like integrity, justice, and separation of powers. Americans have it good overall and they spoil themselves with greed. Thanksgiving to them is about football and cryptocurrency commercials and not enough about actually giving thanks, giving back, selflessness, service, kindness, empathy, and goodwill. Add a drop of ignorance and social media brainwashing and you get a nation with too many zombie mooks wearing red hats that turn out to vote. Easily conned, they ignorantly vote against their own interests. Bernie Sanders and AOC have been showing that there’s a better way to solve problems and to work for every American. But it takes gratitude, selflessness, and work, not lazy golfing and whining.
dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Unsolicited advice, but you have to escape your
-to make it not create a bulleted list.Lemmy uses markdown for its formatting, and this means
-is has special meaning, it is syntax used to create bulleted lists with.For example,
- Isaac Asimovwill look like:- Isaac Asimov
If you want it to look like
- Isaac Asimov
you have to escape the
-character with a\:\- Isaac AsimovThe
\basically says “ignore the special syntax meaning of-as starting a bulleted list, and instead treat it as a literal-”.
My_IFAKs___gone@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Goretantath@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
The republicans have been ruining the education system for decades. Can’t have smart people without paid teachers.
melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
you can, but it doesn’t happen often.
CalipherJones@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Billionaires are extracting all the wealth from this country and convincing the idiots that Maria from El Salvador with 2 dollars to her name is the problem.
HJofVecna@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
First and foremost, beyond all other things, the problem is that people in the United States see no other country but the United States. You have libertarians arguing that taxation is theft as if the United States is the only country in the world with an income tax. You have people talking about 15 minute cities as if it’s some theoretical, untested idea instead of the absolute norm in every other country. America is continually pretending that it can’t see its problems solved everywhere else. That it can’t imagine a better world even though one already exists.
The American dream is an all time amazing piece of propaganda that has left every American imagining that one day, through hard work, they will become the oppressor, and that has created a population so submissive and pliable in the face of its own destruction that Russia, China, and even North Korea could never even dream about.
Lesrid@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
And even moderately wealthy Americans don’t usually travel outside their country. If they do it’s usually from the airport to their hotel.
ArchRecord@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
hotel
I think you mean “all-inclusive” resort (that isn’t all inclusive and actually charges a gazillion dollars in random fees) that makes them feel like they’re experiencing local culture while actually just experiencing the effects of the resort chain exploiting the local population for cheap labor while cheaply imitating the culture.
Don’t worry, we Americans are definitely capable of escaping our cultural bubble! /s
Objection@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
This is very true. A lot of it comes down to chauvinism and, “we’re #1.” If an American sees a problem with the US government, then they’ll conclude that it is a problem inherent to all existing, or even all possible governments. When it does something bad, the worst thing people will say is, “This is like something you’d see in [rival country].” In this way, even while criticizing it, they still reaffirm their belief in their own superiority. And if you deviate from that and point out various ways in which the country is uniquely bad, it means you just knee-jerk hate everything about the country and want it to be bad. We are thoroughly cooked.
paequ2@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
The American dream is an all time amazing piece of propaganda that has left every American imagining that one day, through hard work, they will become the oppressor
Wow, yeah. Well put. This is why they only care about “winning”.
blakemiller@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Advantageous geography has allowed the US to fall upward in success throughout its existence. It’s as simple as that, no joke. By sitting on a mountain of natural resources and having no formidable enemies in the western hemisphere, the US was the default player to take center stage post WW2. Europe was decimated and America funded the war. Bam, the US gets success in spite of its thoroughly racist and regressive culture. Their position (and hubris) became too entrenched for there to ever be a legitimate contender. We might get to witness a changing of the guard now though, we’ll see how much damage 47 does.
FDR era is an incredible circumstance though. The past North’s failure to reconstruct the South led to all kinds of strategic chess moves that ultimately saw the D and R parties swap. The liberals had to put aside the racism problems for a bit so they could unfuck the economy. It was probably the best that the progressives could have hoped to achieve given their challenges.
All said as an American. So we’re not all morons. But it’s a sticky, uphill battle. I’m not sure if it’s fixable without a big change to the world order. Thanks for the question!
yeather@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
The smarter citizens are patriotic enough to try ans stick through and fix the mess, while the stupid Americans are patriotic to the point of messing it up again.
FollyDolly@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Targeted, systematic attacks on education, and a robust propaganda networks ran by billionaires.
Corporate_Hippie@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Absolutely. But also something that is not mentioned enough is American anti-intellectualism. Its a culture where its been completely normalized to have opinions on things based on nothing but a feeling or a youtube video, and then regard those views as equal to analysis that come from experts that have studied their whole lives on the matter.
Not everyone gets to be well educated but it takes a special kind of arrogance to be uninformed and proud.
Guns0rWeD13@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
yes, this plus phones. and it’s not just the right. leftists have become detached from reality too. they live in a insulated bubble of anime and very elementary critical thinking.
Necroscope0@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
This is present on both sides. So many on the left apparently think that burning Tesla’s owned by random people who bought them way before Elon revealed himself to be a Nazi cunt is going to do something other than drive undecided people to the MAGAts that it blows my mind. Looks like a lot of the left agrees with Elon about empathy being weakness because they have none here. Not understanding how regular/ undecided people feel about having their car burnt up and thinking they are going to do anything but get pissed and join the other side is about as unempathetic as it gets. Musk would be proud of them. I just hope it is a vocal minority doing it and agreeing with it and that they are caught and arrested before they can damage the anti MAGA cause too much.
GaMEChld@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“The strain of 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
aaron@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture. Or call it ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’. Community has been replaced by an atomised screen time facing our individual echo chambers. Decades of neoliberalism has impoverished swathes of the population, materially and intellectually. There are many chickens coming home to roost.
orcrist@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
I don’t think postmodernism had much to do with it. Go ask your average MAGA racist if they even know what that term means and they’ll shrug their shoulders. Similarly, the research does not show that your echo chamber theory holds water, and in fact it suggests the opposite. In the days before the world wide web, people were actually stuck in echo chambers, that being the communities where they lived.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture.
I feel like this is a common regressive take. The Right/anti intellectualist movement understood postmodernism as giving them the right to claim that facts don’t matter.
Post modernism itself is a way of interrogating frameworks we take for granted. It’s not saying “facts don’t matter,” it’s saying “how do we know those are facts”? There are valid questions to ask about science as a way of knowing - which epistemological frameworks we take at face value, and if we really can. Lolita is a postmodernist work, because it’s asking you to interrogate what a novel means (in the context of an unreliable narrator - HH is lying to you, but he isn’t real. what does that mean about what is being described in a novel? Is a novel a window into a different universe which has a reality to be described?)
The Right’s unreality is more of a Romantic one - none of those fuckers are reading Derrida or Deleuze. It’s more reality to sexual insecurities and the death drive. I’m not a Freudian but I look at anti intellectuals and see deep sexual confusion and fear. If “male” and “female” are permeable categories, how does someone who defines their existence solely by their white masculinity going to police the boundaries of their own identity?
NeilBru@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I moved to the Netherlands from the U.S. in July of 2022.
My opinion now? There are morons everywhere. I think more, per capita, back in the U.S. of A.
The world is a circus, but in the U.S., you have front row seats.
ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
After WWII there was a halcyon era where nearly every adult in America agreed that nerds had been crucial to our winning. That’s why Operation Paperclip came to be where we stole all the former Axis nerds we could find.
It also led to an unprecedented boom in education spending, research spending, etc., mostly aimed at beating the USSR at technological development. Sputnik goosed that significantly, and the Apollo program briefly did as well, until Americans got bored of Moon landings…
That was probably the first major flashing red warning light most of us ignored: Moon landings… boring!!!
Anyway, educated people started doing things that weren’t directly associated with winning the Cold War, like exposing the dangers of lead in everything, the dangers of smoking, the dangers of chlorofluorocarbons, the dangers of greenhouse gasses, etc.
That threatened the ability of grotesquely wealthy hoarders to hoard even more grotesque levels of wealth.
So they started the project to dismantle education in America.
That project kicked into afterburn once the USSR collapsed and the Cold War ended.
And so far, nerds haven’t been successful in regaining their status.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So they started the project to dismantle education in America.
I’d say it was more of a pushback by the religious right against what they saw as liberalism in the schools. Starting with the late 70s then the election of Regan you saw a huge rise in the evangelicals and they became affiliated with the republicans.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Starting with the late 70s then the election of Reagan
Also around that time televangelist Pat Robertson was an advisor to Reagan and even tried his own run for president.
Objection@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
In addition to valuing nerds as a way to win against the Soviets, there was also a latent fear of a revolution in America that would be supported by and follow the example of the USSR, which created an understanding that the masses had to be kept placated. And if there was anything too awful about society, it would be criticized by the USSR for the sake of gaining soft power, which provided an additional incentive to fix it. Regardless of all the problems that the USSR had, a world order with competing powers (multipolarity) seems to me to be the only way of keeping the worst abuses of any power in check.
Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Lead poisoning. Leaded gasoline started in the 1930s, but in the 50s and 60s we destroyed our public transportation and then destroyed millions of black homes to build highways through our cities. So leaded gasoline peaked in the 70s.
Oh, and boomers, who have the most lead brain damage, hold all the political power because they hold all the wealth.
leauxhigh@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Saying that boomers hold all the wealth is not correct, unless you’re including billionaires. Your comment is ageist and your blame is misplaced. Placing blame on any age group of ordinary people is both stupid and ignorant at the same time. You’re as brainwashed as those you are blaming.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Perhaps they didn’t word it eloquently, but they’re not wrong.
The elderly are the wealthiest and that affords them tremendous political power, seeing as how young people can’t afford to miss a day of work to vote.
Coreidan@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Reddit/Lemmy has taught people to hate boomers. Doesn’t matter if their hate is accurate or not. They’ve been brainwashed to put all blame on boomers and call anyone they don’t like “boomer” as a “gotcha”.
You are 100% right.
In the end it’s turned into an identity for them.
EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You know those scam phone calls from India pretending to be Microsoft? They overwhelmly target the elderly, because their success rate with them is so high. The elderly are without question more gullible when it comes to being taken advantage of over the internet and social media.
The elderly control every branch of our government. Their gulliblity is now something that lets all of us get taken advantage of - not just themselves. They are collectively buying MAGA Hats for the country because some guys on the internet told them it would make America Great. It’s clearly not, hasn’t, and is a scam, but now our entire country has to pay for it.
Even the best, most well trained guards cannot provide protection if they are too old to lift a shield. Our entire government hasn’t been able to lift that shield in decades.
Which explains why 9-11 was “Never Forget,” but Columbine is “Always Forget” for every school shooting that’s happened since '99.
I was a Sophomore in highschool when Colombine happened, and now my kids get to see others their age die yearly in school shootings while President crime grandpa tells us it’s because of trans kids.
It’s not boomers as a generation that’s the problem, it’s that generation is just now old to provide security. At worst, they are too proud to admit their age causes issues in their ability to lead and protect this country. But it unquestionably does.
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Saying that boomers hold all the wealth is not correct
They don’t hold ALL the wealth, but they do hold the most. And that allows them to contribute more to political campaigns and have an outsized effect on legislation.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Anti-intellectualism has a certain tradition in the USA, it’s kind of well-known.
A German perspective: I think Germans have always been this stupid, they’re mostly just more willing to say the quiet part out loud than they were between 1970 and 2014 (rough estimate). The difference is that the far right extremists have a popular platform now, and the mainstream parties refuse to ban either the far right party or all the media (X, Facebook, local tabloid press etc.) that’s pushing them. If this party had been around in 1960, it would definitely have been banned.
conicalscientist@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There was definitely a time when people were smarter. I read a comment on r/xennials that stuck with me. They were lamenting the loss of a the culture of their youth. I’m not sure I can rephrase it as well as they said it.
Basically they were describing how it used to be about how we questioned things. Like the show The X-Files. It was about seeking the truth. They noted how that show was reflective of how reality was. There was this common mindset that the answers are out there. That we can work together even to seek the answers and we will find them inevitably.
You see that doesn’t make much sense in 2025 because everyone has the answer to anything and everything. Except it’s their own answer. Not the answer. More than ever their answer is one which is derived from their internet / social media bubble.
There is no longer some big unknown out there full of mysteries to unravel. Not anymore. The zeitgeist right now is that I have my own world view and that’s the one. I know how the system works. I know the way. It’s the way I see the world. So why doesn’t everyone else come join my world view??? Are they stupid?
In the past we didn’t know everything. Nobody knew anything. Nobody had any illusion that they did. Nor could they whip out their pocket rectangle and find answers immediately.
In the past people had to be more open minded. They had to be honest about not knowing. Without modern media they had to be seekers of knowledge. As opposed to over confident purveyors relying on a quick internet search (these days a simple GPT query). The modern zeitgeist is one where everybody talks. Nobody listens. 8 billion deaf ears listening and learning nothing. Just waiting for their turn to talk. Everyone learned everything and they’re so damn sure of it.
Stupid people think they know it all. Smarter people are unsure of what they know. Of course there were stupid people before. But they knew they were stupid. Today the stupids can mask it by repeating words from the podcast, the tiktoks, the youtube videos they just watched.
PurpleSkull@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
So our technological progress has brutally outgrown our cultural one. I think you’re right.
krydret_ismaskine@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
That’s exactly it. Our biases and community instincts (for lack of a better word) can’t keep up with the firehose of information and direct communication with so many people and from so many sources.
In the past, small societies sort of kept things in check. You knew the people around you and everyone sort of found a common ground to share. Like when I was a kid in the countryside, I made friends with the other kids on our road because of proximity, not because we had tons in common. But we became friends despite being different and gained new experiences and built common ground through that. We learned to compromise and solve differences or issues.
Today you can find community anywhere online, so you’re less likely to have your “rough edges” smoothed out a bit.
Not that life in small societies is perfect, Svante described the Jantelov for a good reason, some small villages communities can get very insular, xenophobic and oppressive of anyone slightly off from the standard mold.
But I do think our range and speed of communication has outpaced our instincts and reference frames.
Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There was a time when computers were designed to grow our culture:
www.quora.com/…/Harri-K-Hiltunen
swelter_spark@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
This is very insightful.
melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
so, the 1940s were a result of what happened in the 20s and thirties. and america almost went nazi. like, we almost had a nazi president elected instead of FDR the first time, and the business plot almost worked. would have, if they hadn’t chosen a military leader who’d turned socialist since retiring.
the 1960s… honey. do you really believe america was leftist? there were some kids who were. the anti war movement was pretty big, and they all had to be okay with lefty tactics, but it’s not fair to say ‘america was leftist’. richard nixon still got elected the first time.
americans are traiend to be cattle. this is true. and yes, the techniques for that training are better than they used to be.
look up what happened in the late 70s and 80s. it kiiiinda started under carter, but you get the sense he would have pulled back once he saw how it was going, and also tried to do good stuff (it just literally all got stopped). look at the career of newt gingrich. plus, ronald reagan and it’s consequences have been a disaster for humanity. they set in motion subtle sabotage of society that devastated the potential of future education or anything becoming less awful, while most of the cool people around at the time were exiled locked in deep dark cages or straight up assassinated by feds.
nylo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
who is the Nazi that was almost president instead of FDR?
melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
lindberg; guy who famously killed his own baby. apparently pretty good at planes.
pulsewidth@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Carl Sagan released his book The Demon Haunted World in 1995, where he championed the scientific method and critical thought and lamented the dumbing down of (particularly US) society, so no… It’s not new.
I will add that your premise is wrong on the 60s. The leftism in the 60s was counter-culture, it was small and it was mostly confined to the youth… It was certainly not the prevailing attitude of the country. It was not unlike the leftist groups you see in the US today - small, loud, and a reaction to the heavily conservative country they find themselves in.
MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Like most (all?) big counter-culture movements, most of the people who were “in” it were not really there for deep seated beliefs. It was cool, there were parties and music, sex and drugs were plentiful. Then it was time to grow up put all that stuff behind them.
I don’t mean to disparage the whole hippie thing. Lots of people really believed in it and do to this day. I just think the majority were there for the fun then got back to “real life”.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
I think this time will be different because there isn’t a “normal” to go back to because it’s literally not there anymore. You can’t have a career or a family or ow. A house like you used to. The right wants tradwives but not to pay a man enough his wife can bot have to work and that’s why that shit isn’t going anywhere. Society is going to have to change a whole lot and not backwards
callouscomic@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Yes. Vaguely going backwards, cherrypicking some things:
- Fox News and lack of fairness doctrine
- Citizens United
- A fucking Vice President shot a guy (Cheney was part two, actually)
- Reaganism
- Pointless wars for money
- McCarthyism
- The backlash that began after reconstruction era and boiled over during the early 20th century era immigration that saw increased nationalization and christian zealotry specifically leading to Christianity and “patriotism” forced into laws, on money, in schools, amd such. So many “murican” things that some morons think have been a constant since the founding fathers was actually forced by scared white people in power 100 years ago.
- Civil War
- Side note, did you know even Lincoln was a scheming politician? He pulled strings to ensure he’d have enough electoral votes for his re-election, including pushing for a new state he knew would be loyal to him
- All the lead up to the Civil War, which began with our differences and divide right at the founding of the country. We didn’t get along since the beginning.
- Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee
- Everything else we’ve done to Native people
- A fucking Vice President shot a guy in a duel (this was part one)
- Some personal letters of founding fathers like Washington divulge how yhey actually thought about slaves and how they struggled to see them as humans
- The vast majority of people were not free and did not have voting rights when the country was founded, making the declaration and most of the constitution to come later laughable at best in how they worded things. They explicitly cared about white landowning males with money.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Adding in Russian back propaganda, plus funding right wint groups as well
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Are we more stupid than we used to be? Yeah. But I’d use the word ignorant instead. It’s a bit more accurate. Ignorance is chosen, and that’s what our current epidemic of stupidity is. Chosen.
There have always been a lot of ignorant people, but now, with social media, those people have platforms to infect others with their ignorance. Also, in my own lifetime, I’ve witnessed a shift from ignorant people still being able to set aside partisan politics to condemn obviously bad actors or decisions to 100% doubling down on partisan politics no matter how bad the person or action is.
I’ve definitely FELT this increase in willful ignorance over the course of my life living in this country. People in my own life choosing to believe things they absolutely would not have believed a couple decades ago. People not understanding super basic concepts.
I think there are other factors than just bad actors spreading ignorance on social media. I think a lot of it has to do with simple distractions. The modern world has so many. A lot of the people I know don’t even read books. Like, they simply don’t read. If I ask them what book they read last they have to concentrate because it was multiple years ago. That’s fucking crazy. Instead of picking up a book they’re watching Real Wives of Whatever. Getting involved in some wealthy person’s 1st world problems, instead of, you know, learning something.
We’re entering an age of concentrated ignorance and, unfortunately, that’s very unlikely to end anytime soon. And the stakes are higher than ever for something like that to happen because we possess greater power to decimate this planet than we used to. Through pollution or braindead child-like politicians who can wage war or launch nukes.
It takes a lot less effort to allow things to keep going the way they are than it does to turn things around and responsibly educate the masses. So we’re probably going to continue spiraling.
Things are going to get dark. Our quality of life will decline.
Underwire@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t know but check out the show All in the Family which was aired in the 70s. I don’t think they have exaggerated the character of Archie Bunker. I really think that there were many people like him during that era. And he is exactly like the pro Trump that we are seeing right now.
I remember him saying in one episode “Nixon is intelligent as he knows how to avoid paying taxes”. That argument comes up from pro Trump people.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
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.
PlausibleDupont@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
Here in Europe we used to think Americans were stupid.
And it’s not like it’s prejudice from people never leaving their hometown. Nope, actually TV shows and movies make Americans look way smarter than they are.
Nope, the conclusion comes from people that met real Americans, either in Europe or in the US.
Last time I saw an American in Paris he was asking for ketchup on top of his duck breast. The most barbaric thing I’ve seen in a while 😂
InvertedParallax@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
The south was always this racist, they were just isolated.
When social media unleashed their filth upon the nation the billionaires realized they had the ultimate weapon: a political bloc that voted purely on emotion, especially hate.
JehovasThickness@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
DrunkEngineer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin
tranceFusion@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
The short version is this - once politicians realized that human engagement was maximized by anger, a segment of politicians focused on making white christian Americans believe they were a minority group under attack and being disenfranchised by their country. The seeds of this have been getting sowed for decades.
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.
Pronell@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The gish gallop has gone mainstream.
What we needed, twenty to forty years ago at the bare minimum, were journalists who were willing to shut that shit down.
I remember being a child watching the news with my parents and seeing an oil company defender accusing the scientists of chasing profits.
Like what the fuck? How did that not end immediately with “And who is currently profiting?” is and always has been beyond me.
…I’m not sure that’s a great example of the gish gallop. Technically.
My point was that we now report the untrue claims rather than saying, from the start, “This candidate said something completely false and not worth repeating.”
For clicks, views, the algorithm, for profit. Nope. It was all to game the system in order to destroy it.
Sorry, this probably isn’t coherent but I’m tired and tipsy, and I’ve chosen to hit save.
Philote@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Of course this is death by a thousand cuts. For me a lot of blame goes to the Reagan administration. They really set up the next 40 yrs plus with trickle down economics. It really hammered home that government is for profit of corporations, not a non-profit service for the people. Citizens United vs FEC (1988) also opened the flood gates to money in politics with no recourse by the public. It’s been a downhill from there in my opinion.
Pronell@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I should’ve given the full context - when I was a kid watching the news with my parents it was likely late in the Carter administration, or early in Reagan’s. So yeah, fully agreed.
banadushi@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
*2010