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The problem is that it's not a question of intelligence.
Trumpists and their ilk are living in echo chambers of "alternative facts", perpetuated by Fox News, Murdoch newspapers and an nearly endless amount of rightwing influencers (starting with Rogan at the top). They are not looking at what's happening, because they are surrounded in a very comforting bubble of disinfo and propaganda that confirms everything they wanted to hear: The illegals get deported, the queers get finally put in their place, the liberals are frothing with anger, finally men are back in charge who tell women where they belong and America is going to be "great" again any moment now.
It's fascism and fascism has always been a "cult": The early pioneers of fascism (particularly D'Annunzio and later Mussolini) explicitly said their aim was to create a "secular religion" around the nation, the people and the leader. And you can only be a member of that religion if you accept its "truth" and reject everything that contradicts it.
Very smart people can adhere to a religion for a variety of reasons and the most obvious one is (and always has been) because it promises them power over others.
The problem is that it’s not a question of intelligence.
Not specifically intelligence, but I can make a very strong case that a lot of the problem comes from language. Or specifically the lack of language abilities in a percentage of the population who have missed important developmental milestones growing up.
Not speaking out my ass on this one, I have been researching the connections between learning language at an early enough age and being able to form complex or non-linear thoughts.
It's been studied in human children who were raised by animals (this has happened more times than people realize) that even when they were taken into human society, given shelter and taught how to be a human, they are never able to learn more than the most basic language skills, using single nouns to indicate wants, but nothing more complex than that. This has led to the understanding that if language isn't learned at an early enough age, we "pave over" parts of the brain that could have been used to learn how to turn complex ideas into abstractions, a way to view alternate perspectives and understand the views of others.
So what about the less extreme cases? What about people who just didn't have adequate education in language skills, or were raised in an environment that squelched talking, reading, asking questions or thinking broadly. (Such as poor communities, religious upbringing, conservative policing of thought and identity, and so on.)
This is creating an entire segment of society that aren't just kinda dim, they are actually incapable of anything other than linear, reactive thought patterns. Memories, associations, feelings... no mental "story" to explain their lives, just whatever they're told they go along with.
You can see great evidence of this trend in the abysmal reading scores that Americans have. Nearly a quarter of our adult population is functionally illiterate and this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, people who can read a few words and understand a text message if the sender is using simple enough language and emojis. People who pretend to discard the instruction manual because they "already know how to do it" but really they just can't form mental narratives from paragraphs of information. This is really, really bad. This is why we have Trump. This is why our market is crashing.
You make a lot of important points. I'd like to also add that those same communities actively discourage critical thinking.
We all enter the world without knowing how it works. We spend our early childhood learning the rules of reality, sometimes testing them. Consider an infant in a high chair that repeatedly drops their spoon - will the spoon fall to the ground again? Is this a consistent thing? What if it just hovers in the air this time? Gotta drop it again and find out.
Our brains not only build a set of "rules" about how the world works, but our imaginations help us fill in what we don't know. Like how having scared feelings at night can be interpreted by children as a monster hiding in the corner. They don't know the world with any sort of certainty, but their emotions are strong, so of course the existence of a monster makes sense.
Now imagine that nobody ever told you that monsters aren't real. Imagine, instead, that the adults around you reinforced such fears, by using words like "demons" or "devils" to describe the creature you should be afraid of. These same adults can't answer the "Why?" questions that kids have, except to say "God did it." Natural scientists get blocked from information that can help them accurately understand the world.
But it goes beyond simply maintaining ignorance. When kids are raised to sustain their magical thinking past the point where it is developmentally appropriate, they never acquire the mental scaffolding upon which reasoning is built. The logical way to connect concept A to concept B is obvious to you or me, but doesn't stand out for them. Why? Because magical thinking is a free-for-all. Such kids are actively taught to misunderstand reality. If there are no rules to making things make sense, or if everything is some invisible creature's "mysterious plan," then what you or I would call a "logical conclusion" becomes just one of many, equally-valid possibilities.
magical thinking is a free-for-all. Such kids are actively taught to misunderstand reality.
Every point you made is correct, this as well. I want to add the nuance here though, that I have considered this but it's not final. That is to say, it's not an impassable wall that a child can't break through on their own. Namely because this is my origin story and I have been asked many times how I got out of it and escaped a cult-like family environment with a compound in the wilderness and everything. I had the very same magical thinking fed to me after being denied an education in any capacity for the first couple decades of my life. But I at least broke the mental spell a lot earlier, and I did it completely on my own by reaching out into the world with curiosity.
And again I think it starts with language. Because even though I was being fed magic, I have distinct memories of wrestling that magic against logic and things I understood about the world. I couldn't tell what was real or not, and even though I was scared of "questioning faith" I was also able to use logic/language to create reasoning for my inquisitiveness. IE: "God would want me to learn about his creation." "Maybe this science stuff can exist alongside the god stuff" and so on.
The reason I was able to have these mental debates in my head at all was I was an avid reader and my family didn't ban comic books for my siblings, and I used those to teach myself to read. Then I learned that I could buy and horde paperbacks because I was the only one who could really read things without pictures. Most of my family was also functionally illiterate. I however had a deeply visual and story-oriented mental landscape from before puberty.
I just think if there's any antidote to ALL OF THIS gesturing broadly then it has to be language and reading, and not reading screens but things that force your brain to construct from abstraction. That act is what makes that scaffolding you reference. You can't logic your way into new ways of viewing the world if you don't have a sense for logic to begin with. Yes, A to B. A child can see it for themselves if they are given that framework to start building their structured thinking.
Not putting enough money into education of the population is a crime against humanity done by the wealthy class. It's a tragedy and it's infuriating and it's well understood, yet nothing ever changes, because education threatens the power of capital, while all that capital needs is cheap labor and stupid cattle consumers to support their "infinite growth".
On poor reading skills, this was a really interesting read/listen: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ - We've apparently just been teaching kids how to read poorly, and not because of like a sinister agenda. That almost makes it worse, that it started with good intentions.
Also I think about how a lot of the people who are, as you're alluding to, bad at language simply won't show up on a platform like this that's all text. That's probably why visual platforms like youtube and tiktok are hugely popular. There are a lot of people who simply cannot comfortably operate in a text-first medium.
people who are, as you’re alluding to, bad at language simply won’t show up on a platform like this that’s all text
I absolutely agree, this is making for another related problem, which is it's dividing people. We're not all seeing the same things, we're not understanding each other, we're moving to wildly different spaces from each other, and it's creating bubble universes where we view each other as separate species.
People who adore language and reading and writing are going to soak up the world's diverse perspectives and ideas like a sponge, and will seek out other infonauts in the world and will have much broader perspectives that may in fact become exclusionary quite easily.
I don't think someone with a more... lets call it "visual" intelligence system is a lost cause, I honestly think if you're someone who hates reading and can't write you're handicapped, but we have a modern society that is supposed to at least, take care of the handicapped like we've been doing for millenia. There are ways you can understand the world and abstractify information, but it's going to be a much greater challenge, and people like this are more likely to stay in their own family units and social circles of people just like them so they avoid ridicule or embarrassment.
This should be the actual democrats message before voting begins
effectively calling at least a quarter of the population some kind of mentally handicapped is certainly a novel strategy...
i wonder why politicians don't typically run on such a platform? /s
Yes, I think we are both in agreement that there is a distinction between intelligence and education. And - while these two points often get thrown together - it matters in political contexts, particularly because the Trumpists attempt to destroy the education system which they see as an obstacle to their rule. Critical thinking and language skills matter.
comforting
That's the key word. The promises of greatness don't actually have to be delivered. You can be in the midst of a pandemic and/or collapsing economy. As long as you have the comforting myth.
Same idea behind conspiracy theories.
Uncertainty is scary. Instead of feeling that fear (and turning to a project like science), any imagination that explains the unknown will work.
Exactly right. The one saving grace is that most cults are tied to their leader. Once Trump is gone, MAGA will fracture into sub-groups over who to follow.
There’s a creator who goes by the name Knitting Cult Lady, who grew up in the Kingdom of God cult and then became intelligence for the US Army. She has some very enlightening insight on the cult of MAGA. Pretty fascinating stuff actually.
The
Branch DavidianJim Jones kool-aid test was a great analogy for Trump’s fearmongering. The leader would ask people to drink poisoned kool-aid as a final test of faith. They had to experience the horror of facing their own death, only to then be filled with relief upon finding it was only a test. This was repeated over many occasions before the kool-aid was actually laced with poison. Trump keeps talking about taking Greenland by force so when the time comes, we’ll be desensitized to the reality.Wasn't Jim Jones the koolaid test? The Branch Davidians went up in flames in Waco, TX after the Feds attempted to raid them.
Or did they both do it? It's been a while since I read about David Koresh.
You’re absolutely correct. Edited for accuracy.
Ill have to take a look into Knitting Cult Lady, sounds like a very interesting perspective
Yes, but as someone who is unfortunately related to dozens of Trump supporters, many of them are also dumb. A couple of them are just raging bigots who are happy to buy into the lie, but a lot of them are objectively not very smart. I could tell from a pretty young age, well before politics entered the picture, and my family isn't unique. My cousins married people from similar families and had kids that are also kind of dumb.
There's nothing inherently wrong with being dumb. There are plenty of people who do just fine and are kind, decent humans. But Republicans saw the less intelligent as a target, and that echo chamber is a lot more effective when you don't have critical thinking skills. Fighting against it feels impossible because logic and facts don't really make a dent.
I agree.
The other thing to consider is that while the stock market is tanking many of these people don't have investments like that.
My experience is that conservatives discount anything that is not directly and very obviously affecting them, and even then it takes a while to sink in. They won't change until every retail outlet they patronize jacks the price or every product they use aggressively shrinkflates.
illegals get deported, the queers get finally put in their place, the liberals are frothing with anger, finally men are back in charge
nail on the head with surgical precision, they are getting exactly what they wanted.
everything else is stuff they choose to believe because those are the people making it happen.
Well said
Yeah, it is simply unbelievable but I just saw people thinking drumpf will "pull it off" and "solve debt crisis" in investing.com.
Does their comfort bubble include comfort prices on things? If so how do I get in on that?
It was one thing when all the bad stuff was happening to people they wouldn't associate with, but tanking the economy and firing scores of government employees has gotta be breaking into that bubble, right?
AFAIK that depends really: Sure, those who are not really part of the "cult" will likely drop out, but the "ever faithful" will double down, because they will consider such hardship to be a test of their faith.
That effect can be seen here:
