It’s everywhere, from flat earthers to appointing an alcoholic FOX news bro as Secretary of Defense. We have achieved greatness as a society, but there is a sizable chunk of us who want to burn it all down. Why?
It’s everywhere, from flat earthers to appointing an alcoholic FOX news bro as Secretary of Defense. We have achieved greatness as a society, but there is a sizable chunk of us who want to burn it all down. Why?
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It’s everywhere, from flat earthers to appointing an alcoholic FOX news bro as Secretary of Defense. We have achieved greatness as a society, but there is a sizable chunk of us who want to burn it all down. Why?
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There are unfortunately lots of reasons not to trust medical science. To be clear, I’m 100% on board with vaccinations and trusting scientific institutions in most instances. However, these same institutions have been tools of oppression and exploitation, for example the effects of the Tuskegee incident is living memory for some people. It’s also true to say that the American pharmaceutical industry has a huge problem with overprescribing drugs which was a root cause of the opiod crisis. These are two important factors which create a general mistrust.
Besides that, obviously it’s a combination of religion and misinformation. Christians are skeptical of science, especially American ones, and sometimes science is seen as against ‘traditional values’ like curing your baby of flu by rubbing butter on its forehead or something.
There are manufacturers involved in getting this year. Off the top of my head a non-exhaustive list.
The Republican Party was able to use social issues to maintain a workable coalition while having a ludicrous agenda. That let them cater business interest that needed to see research in things like climate change and smoking and alcohol and guns undermine. In order to do that they needed to sell a message that the scientist don’t actually know anything and they’re all bought and paid for getting exorbitant salaries from special interests and massive government grants that goes straight into their pockets to make them millionaires.
When the pseudo intellectual foundations of Neo conservatism were exposed during the GWB administration, a large number of Americans, having been trained to believe that Democrats were communist and perverts could not move left. So they found a populist movement. That’s how you get JD Vance on the stage talking about how economists don’t know anything.
We’ve also seen a lot of sorting of cranks and conspiracy theorist. Used to be that anti-vaccine sentiments were more prevalent on the left but overall anti-vaccine sentiments were very small. As that switched to being a right wing thing intermingled with other conspiracies. Conspiracy thinking is comorbid. If you believe in anti-vaccine conspiracies and you are exposed to a group that also believes in other conspiracies, you will start to pick up those. And they will strengthen in a vicious cycle. So by moving to the right, the number of people that believe in just one conspiracy theory has dropped because they now believe in all the conspiracy theories.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8489517/ “We find that Christian nationalism is one of the strongest predictors of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy“
https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/ “7 out of 10 Americans are Christian.”
I think there has always been an element of this in society. However I think it has been becoming more prevalent due to media turning away from journalism and becoming info-‘tanment. Throw in a huge helping of misinformation people can find on the internet, and sprinkle on some bad actors and grifters. You find yourself where we are today.
Its a manifestation of ”Authority with out Accountability’.
>What’s Wrong with Technocracy?
>it is undeniable that democratic citizens in many nations find themselves in a position of dependence and distrust, reliant on technocratic institutions but lacking in meaningful mechanisms of oversight and accountability. Technocracy cannot be dismissed as a mere specter of the paranoid populist imagination.
>https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/whats-wrong-with-technocracy/
It’s part of the larger antagonism people have with education and critical thinking.
I basically just see it as laziness. Critical thinking takes work. It’s taxing. People feel relief when they are excused from that work.
Honestly, I think stupid people are gunna stupid people. Every time a toddler kills someone with a gun, every time some child is killed because they don’t have a car seat or because someone wants a pitbull and hasn’t trained it properly etc. etc.
People are just fucking stupid sometimes and unfortunately children can be hurt.
Stop calling it FOX news, in deference to Fox Entertainment .
it’s propaganda and misinformation. Wasn’t there even a lawsuit where they claimed they weren’t bound to journalistic integrity since they were just an entertainment channel?
Multiple reasons. The medical and technological advances we have made are astounding, even in the last 40 years. Take the idea of mRNA vaccines. My parents didn’t even learn the concept of DNA–>mRNA–> protein in school, have no education post high school, and are not in medical fields. They don’t understand the basics of science, let alone how this concept works. And millions upon millions of Americans are the same way. It’s exactly like that for other technology also. People are afraid of things they don’t understand. Add onto that social turmoil and people willing to use those emotions for gain. A lot of these folks feel an existential need to burn down the monster and it’s creator to feel safe again. We are in the burning. It’s going to burn until enough people stand together to put it out. This is the part of the cycle we are in. It fucking sucks.
It all stems from Republicans, from the media to the politicians to the voters themselves, deciding that they always have to position themselves in opposition to whatever it is that liberals support. To the point where they’re denying objective facts of reality.
During the Obama years, we all joked that Republicans would start taping plastic bags over their heads if Democrats came out in support of oxygen.
That joke becomes less hyperbolic with each passing year.
There are too many factors to really isolate any of them; here are a few I consider the most important factors:
>“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.” -Asimov
Ask conservatives, not us.
Because there’s a large % of the population that’s filled with uneducated individuals who are wracked with trauma. These people are constantly in a state of fight or flight and the executive functioning in their brains is disabled. They walk around unable to control their baser instincts, so they are paranoid, afraid, and lacking in the tools to navigate their feelings if they’re even aware of them. They are then preyed upon by fear mongering media like Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Newsmax, and even their friends and family, who use these exact emotions to manipulate them.
TLDR dumb afraid people who have no role models are giving into their lizard brain
People of low intelligence feel threatened by smarter people, so instead of listening to them and respecting them, they make themselves feel better by saying the smarter people are wrong. Also, people who lack critical reasoning skills are especially unlikely to realize that they themselves might be wrong, or have the humility to realize they’re not as smart as others.
It’s ironic. As a person with two Ph.D.s and a long amount of time spent in academic conferences, working in high tech industries, etc., I’m used to being surrounded by extremely smart people, and I often feel inferior and I realize my own inferiority in many aspects of fields where I know enough to know what I don’t know. The thing is — I *like* being surrounded by smarter people, since it elevates me and I can learn from them.
I ran into a very uneducated-sounding Trump supporter at a local fast-food place who started trying to tell me I didn’t know anything about how the economy works… but I’ve taken courses on this at Stanford, I understand the math behind modern financial theory, stochastic calculus, etc etc. It’s absurd how these people think they’re smarter than experts, because of psychology that makes them unable to accept that they’re not smart themselves.
There’s also the disease of religion, of course. When people have spent their whole lives believing in fairy tales that don’t have scientific basis, they’re used to accepting things without evidence as a matter of “faith”, which amounts to blind belief in whatever the cult says is true.
There is actually a book by Tom Nichols about this, fittingly titled The Death of Expertise.
I say technology is probably the biggest culprit in the contemporary era – morons can find one another and get together online, form a digital echo chamber and put it on lockdown to rival Fort Knox, and directly challenge legitimate experts with their delusional bullshit.