“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

at least that long

My sad epiphany of late is that not only are my nation’s population largely unevolved troglodytes whom would barely survive if we weren’t the richest nation and able to provide them with bare-minimum comforts or at least utilities, but so is everyone, everywhere, since before recorded history. And if anything, we’re at a HIGH POINT in human intellect and knowledge. Don’t let the current trends and localized issues trick you, objectively we’re at the highest point in human history for literacy, knowledge of the world, peace, prosperity and communication.

But there have never been nations and leaders of nations who have done all they can to immortalize the times they accidentally sent state secrets to the public journalists. Nope, they etch in stone their accomplishments and genius victories.

This tells me that most of what we know about history and leaders across the world is in fact, utter bullshit, and always has been. The reality is everyone is fantastically dumb and it’s only our creative minds working as a group that let us get this far. People like Trump and his cabinet are an unavoidable side-effect of the fact that largely, our population is very easy to manipulate, and people generally care far less about what’s true or not than they do how comfortable they are.

Isaac Asimov spoke on it in 1980, and how it had been going on for quite some time by then https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf

I am American. The answer is both a Yes and a No. It doesn’t have so much to do with stupidity, but that our education system has been slowly dismantled since the 90’s. Rather than teaching civics, critical thinking, and basic knowledge about government, economics and their inner workings we’ve setup a system that favors test scores and nothing else. Has that made people more stupid? Possibly, but I think it has more to do with only learning the answers rather than how to get there. There’s just this huge in-between of information that a lot of people don’t seem to be able to work out on their own without having a lot of hints of what the outcome will be. It saddens me to see people’s gears just come to a grinding halt trying to work out simple solutions on things.

I think the biggest bane in America is our work culture. We’ve setup a dog eat dog system of trying to strive for the most success at any cost. Work culture in America is fickle, back stabby, and rife with favoritism over quality of work. The biggest lie we were ever told was that we could be the next Bill Gates, or Elon Musk, or some other rich billionaire mogul. The biggest lie we were ever told was to invest in the stock market and have a 401k. The biggest lie we were ever told is that if we worked our asses off that we’d automatically be successful. America is just a grindhouse that treats the working class like shit and unless you decide to be a bridge burning greedy fucking asshole you’ll never really get anywhere with any real upward mobility.

Lastly, I will say that America and American’s themselves has become more and more isolationist in the last couple of decades. Maybe it is social media and the echo chambers they cause. Maybe it is the fake friendships and feeling like you are just collecting trading cards instead of making real insightful and meaningful relationships. Maybe it is the dog eat dog work culture or the keeping up with the Jones’s mentality of things like Instagram and Facebook. Maybe it is a bit of everything. The fact remains that there is a huge friendship pandemic in this country and it only gets worse and worse as many of us further isolate ourselves from reality, critical thinking, and the prospect of being really challenged by the people we could be surrounding ourselves with.

All of this has culminated in a culture that is becoming more work and money focused, less people and social relationship focused, and by and large more shallow and less well rounded and interesting overall. No generation is immune from it either. Whether you are young or old you can fall victim to all I’ve outlined above. Most people have let the technology and systems in place take away their freedom of thought and originality to instead become a husk of the human potential they once were or could be again because it is easier to fall prey to hive mind apathy and cynicism than to fight for your own uniqueness and truer sense of self.

A good chunk is due to the religious right slowly infiltrating our school boards since the 70’s, undermining education. Also our school system is developed to make people just smart enough to do jobs, but not smart enough to question them. We aren’t taught critical thinking. Also being taught hyper individualism works against us taking collective action as adults.

no, it’s been a thing brewing since effectively the end of ww2 and the rewriting of “american culture” more broadly since then. It’s only gotten worse over time as we have less and less of a defined and agreed upon societal structure.

Which has eroded the importance of institutions like the government over time. Which the right specifically has aggressively capitalized on.

Ah, yes, you found the lemmy cheat code. Making fun of americans.

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 having.

They wanted less government interference, but instead got an authoritarian state with no funding for education, healthcare or police training.

It has been building to this for a while. When the republicans are in office it escalates a lot, and when the Democrats are in office it escalates less, but it only ever escalates.

This is what a private education system gets you.

In the 60s the counterculture decided that all authority and anything taught to them was wrong and they thought they were smarter than anyone else and their gut feelings were just as valid as education. Hippies and conspiracy obsessed right wingers converged towards things like quack medicines, conspiracy mongering, etc. Anti intellectualism, hand in hand with anti authoritarianism, has become the norm. No one with a normal personality would run for office now because the knee-jerk response is to pile hate on them so you only get dysfunctional people running for office. Watergate was a major influence as it confirmed, to them, that the gov was full of dirty secrets and actors. The assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK and the failing Vietnam war and draft added to the “everything is broken” mindset. The internet has only made things worse by allowing these people to find each other and reinforce their beliefs.

One of the biggest backlashes against the 60s was that people were tired of the constant protests and the collapse of cities like NYC which led to Nixon winning on a “law and order” platform that Reagan would later use. Then in the 80s you saw the rise of evangelical Christians against what they saw as liberalism in society. Reagan ironically used the “don’t trust the man” mentality to destroy a lot of business restrictions like the Fairness Doctrine in the media.

Yeah, the people of the United States have been so stupid for so long that Europe and Canada have spent the last month scrambling to figure out how to do without all the things they rely on us for, to include computer operating systems, CPU architecture, to cloud computing and payment processing systems.

In authoritarian societies, restricting education serves a purpose as a sort of anesthesia for the minds of the people. Solzhenitsyn, describing the few years just before the Great Terror of 1937 started in the Soviet Union, mostly from the perspective of a political prisoner (from Volume II, Chapter 4 of the “Gulag Archipelago” which can be found in its entirety on the web, in The Archive):

And the clock of history was striking. […] The Great Leader (having already in mind, no doubt, how many he would soon have to do away with) declared that the withering away of the state (which had been awaited virtually from 1920 on) would arrive via, believe it or not, the maximum intensification of state power! This was so unexpectedly brilliant that it was not given to every little mind to grasp it, but Vyshinsky, ever the loyal apprentice, immediately picked it up: “And this means the maximum strengthening of corrective-labor institutions.” […] And this was not some satirical magazine cracking a joke either, but was said by the Prosecutor General. […] All this was printed in black on white, but we still didn’t know how to read.¹ The year 1937 was publicly predicted and provided with a foundation.
And the hairy hand² tossed out all the frills and gewgaws too. Labor collectives? Prohibited! […] Professional and technical courses for prisoners? Dissolve them! […] Graphs, diagrams? Tear them off the wall and whitewash the walls.

1 My take: The author and his peers most definitely knew how to read, but they could not fully comprehend what was being published because of its, at that time, unparalleled egregiousness.
2 Certainly the one of Stalin.

The US Empire failed to raise successors that understand how it works, and thus they raised a generation of “true believers” in the myths and lies the more competent generations of leaders spread to legitimize their policy. Look at the defunding of programs like USAID, which has historically played a critical role in US-sponsored regime change, now seen as “woke” by the current admin.

Ive travelled through the states a couple times. You guys have always been quirky. You believe you have X level of freedom, while the rest of the world clearly sees it aint true, huge ugly car infrastructure and massive health problems yet somehow your chins are up high.

Besides that, i have met and partied with am american guy nicknamed meat who looked like xmens juggernaut (neck and head fused) chug an alcoholic 4 loko from a beer bong and then screech like a pterodactyl and then i had a nice long discussion with 2 women who worked on the hillary clinton campaign. In the same town 1 day apart from each other

There are extremes everywhere.

Have americans always been stupid? Yes. Have americans always been this stupid? No.