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I sometimes wish I were that dumb
(slrpnk.net)
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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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