Sorry if the premise is inflammatory, but I’ve been stymied by this for a while. How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country? I get it - not everything is bad now, and not everything was good then. FDR’s internment camps, etc.
That said - our country seems to be at a low point in intellectualism and accountability. The DHHS head is an antivaxxer, the deputy chief of the DOJ is a far-right podcast nutball, etc. Their supporters seem to have no nuance to their opinion beyond “well, Trump said he’d fix the economy and I don’t like woke.”
Have people always been this unserious and unquestioning, or are we watching the public’s sanity unravel in real time? Or am I just imagining some idealistic version of the past that never existed, where politicians acted in good faith and people cared about the social order?
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 2020 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.
Driving in a car/metal box instead of sharing the space or walking/cycling and connecting to others is another one.
Othering of others is super easy in a car. There are studies about how much more violent and vitriolic people are when driving.
Yeah lack of third spaces and class mixing is big. Everyone is segregated into their own existing (shrinking) in groups, that then get concentrated by the webiverse.
The 70s oil crisis was an inflection point for Europe and a lot of cities/countries started moving back away from cars as the sole transportation option but the US didn’t have the same reaction.
Not to mention the rise of vehicle violence, running over protesters and such.
Every country suffers from this, America is just the most rich and therefore visible due to geographic benefits and the Bretton Woods system.
Germany was actively shutting down its nuclear power before Russia attacked, China has a giant property bubble that’s collapsing, the Eurozone is rushing in a CBDC to prop up its failing currency, Canada is doing mass immigration to hide it’s failing business climate. Its the same all over, people love faux economic growth and they love to borrow from the future.
Every country suffers from what? Mass stupidity?
Maybe that’s true but it certainly seems like we are more individualistic and stupid than most…and I don’t think those two things are entirely unrelated.
Are you familiar with the elders of zion, which was believed by a huge number of people all over the globe, even though it was totally ridiculous. The average person is not smart, though I may be a tad pessimistic I suppose.
At one point, it seemed like we were getting smarter, and then we very didn’t.
Lead was used in Europe too, and is still used by some member states. If there’s anything we know about micro plastics, it’s that they are ubiquitous. What we don’t know is what effects, if any, they have on health/cognition.
America is more car-oriented than most other western countries and leaded gas is how we did the majority of our poisoning.
Yes, of course microplastics are everywhere, but I’ve read studies saying that internationally they’re eating about the same amount of plastic as we did years ago, but they kind of plateaued whereas here in the good ol USA people still don’t know that it’s not a good idea to eat three meals a day of microwaved food cooked in plastic containers.
Unless you can show any research done that indicates micro plastics influence intelligence I wouldn’t be using that as an answer to this.
Yeah, I’m a hunching it up a bit, but I can’t imagine it’s a good thing (for reasoning) to have your brain full of microplastics.
It’s a bit of an aside, but there’s a large amount of absurdity in expecting scientific rigor in lemmy comments when purportedly scientific bodies are being led by vaccine-denying simpletons.
That ubiquitous expectation of powerless individuals to reason and behave perfectly while ultra-powerful people can behave like spoiled five year olds is foundational in making life fucking miserable for me personally.