There is a meaning of stupid that refers to the inability to take-in and understand what is happening; and that is the way in which the masses are stupid in the modern Western world. Intractably stupid. Their inability to learn from repeated experience is apparently infinite.
The correct explanation for intractable stupidity is not what is usually put forward: the relevant stupidity has almost nothing to do with propaganda and censorship of information.
People can have access to sufficient relevant facts, and true-enough theories to explain them - but remain utterly stupid; because they cannot generalize from one situation to another, from one day to the next.
Anybody who needs every specific situation, every time something happens, re-explaining - is stupid; or, at any rate, stupid in the meaning I'm using here.
People, ordinary people, The Masses - even servants, serfs and slaves - were not stupid in the past like they are stupid now; despite that they were uneducated, illiterate, and had very little information or explanation.
(Indeed, their ignorance was an indomitable last line of defence.)
One difference is that they (in the past) were able and willing to think for themselves - and no matter how ignorant and uneducated they were, this set a limit to how much and how often they could be deceived. There was a very basic, survival-orientated "peasant cunning" or common sense that stood in the path of the masses accepting anything and everything, when it impinged directly upon their lives and immediate surroundings.
And in the past (almost-) everybody was religious; which meant they had a larger, more coherent and more extended understanding of reality than the modern masses. The meaning of life in the past extended beyond emotions to the divine; whereas for Modern Man feelings are the bottom-line of what we acknowledge to be reality.
(Including "facts" - because it is our feelings about a fact that actually decide whether or not a fact is real.)
As so often, mass stupidity cannot be ameliorated by double-negative methods.
In other words; because error is infinitely expansible, we cannot solve the problem of error by correcting an ever-increasing multiplicity of errors.
Falsifying errors (negating negations) is a mug's game - although it provides permanent employment for pundits.
The answer is, and must be; simple, positive, coherent.
If each among the masses had a positive and coherent idea of what his life was about, where his life was aimed-at: if he knew what he positively desired in a permanent, eternal sense - then all possible deceptions would (in principle) sooner or later be detectable in terms of their interference with this life goal.
Learning would be possible, because someone who knows where he wants to go and how, can recognize (without needing to be told) who and when others are trying to push him off-course.
In sum; the modern masses are intractably stupid because they are suffering the mental sickness that is mainstream ideology - those ruling assumptions that include atheism/ materialism/ leftism.
The good news is that this mental sickness is self-chosen - in the sense of being passively consented-to and then actively defended against refutation.
And that is also the bad news.
12 comments:
I share your observation, and I have, seriously, been wondering if it is genetic, a mutation caused by information drowning.
I have written articles recently where I have coined this new race Homo Imbecilis.
I have also coined another new race Homo Inhabilis, wondering whether all those who don't grow up but sit at home and play video games until old age, are having a genetic defect, a mutation, making them unable to cope with real life.
Or is it simply the overstimulation of the society that is making these expected reactions?
@Geir
I have argued in various places that our most basic problems are neither biological nor sociological in origin; but ultimately the consequence of changes in consciousness that are ultimately of divine origin. People en masse (i.e societies as a whole) have made the wrong spiritual responses to these changes.
@Geir
"...wondering whether all those who don't grow up but sit at home and play video games until old age, are having a genetic defect, a mutation, making them unable to cope with real life."
Do we need to have a biological explanation for this phenomena? Maybe it plays a part, but more simply: If your view of "real life" is the more-or-less the mainstream materialist one, life isn't even particularly real, so why not spend your meaningless monkey dream playing video games, or indeed, "whatever"? It isn't any less meaningful (to him) than whatever else you would suggest the pathological gamer to be doing.
@Evan
I think it is necessary to look behind the feelings-based ("it works for me") explanations that people most would give for their behaviour.
Trying to help other people (adults), supposedly for their own good, is a very fraught business.
Unless people change for reasons they themselves have arrived at and positively endorsed, then motivations have been unaffected and the spiritual situation has not been helped.
I wish I could disagree, but I cannot. the ending of the piece was very good and very true.
In the church age people evaluated things in terms of whether or not they conformed to well understood standards of what is good, holy, righteous and just. Now they have been beaten over the head relentlessly for generations that all that was bigotry and nonsense and that the only true authority is SCIENCE. And, since SCIENCE is something you need a specialized degree to understand, no one has a leg to stand on if he tries to argue against this or that authoritative, SCIENTIFIC, pronouncement. That the media figures tasked with conveying these pronouncements themselves take them on faith never matters. The mere invocation of "SCIENCE" causes a awed hush to descend. Formerly it was understood that everyone knew what was good and true when they saw it or that one's cleverer or more holy neighbors or family members could help you to see it. Now we live in the true "age of faith" when total ignorance is universally imputed and admitted. Such a society has no basis for any kind of judgement. Every situation must await "SCIENCE" to give its infallible decision. And so, everyone is, for all intents and purposes, as you say, stupid.
@Avro - That's part of it. But in practice the professional research establishment (which used to be "science forty-plus years ago, but now isn't) is just a bureaucratic mechanism.
"Science" now functions rather like management consultants, or "independent enquiries" - to create a pseudo-objective rationalization for... whatever the leadership class currently want people to believe or to do.
As you say, the only "science" anybody knows; is what politicians, media, management etc are telling them is the-science; and it has as much intrinsic validity as the other stuff that politicians, media, management etc tell people: i.e. none.
I wonder how many people suffering from mental health issues are a direct or an indirect consequence of their inability to reconcile the inherent contradictions created by the cognitive dissonance that results.
@A - I personally believe that a high proportion of the population have "mental health issues" from a variety of causes - genetic, developmental, drug-induced (mostly prescribed drugs, often the psychiatric drugs), alcohol, and various toxicities due to hormones etc in food and water and self-administered.
But metal health is not the root of the core, spiritual problem. The healthiest, wealthiest, most intelligent and hardest-working people are much closer to the root of the problem.
cecil1 has left a comment on your post:
I also wonder if people are more stupid now because of the extreme specialization most people have in their jobs now, coupled with the massive amount of information in uncoalesed form that is available.
So you find 'experts' who are very knowledegable in their field of activity, but a strange combination of stupid and indifferent to even trying to learn much about other areas. This leads to an attitude to defer to the experts in other fields just as they think of themselves as experts in their own narrow area.
I know some very smart people who are professionals in a demanding field, but or maybe because of that fact they are very much uninterested and unconcerned with issues in other areas. This was very obvious during the Birdemic, but they were like that before and after too.
The specialized work can be mentally exhausting, and that leaves them uninterested -- and often strangely proud of the fact they are uninterested.
strangely proud of the fact they are uninterested
An old friend of mine - highly intelligent, tho' burdened by a bundle of progressive opinions - enjoys saying, "of course, I know nothing about history."
I can't argue, on that point at least.
@cecil 1 and HM - You might be interested by the phenomenon of "micro-specialization" that I discuss in my book about the corruption of science: https://corruption-of-science.blogspot.com/
I regard it as a self-interested defence against refutation - some scientific fields are incoherent nonsense, but they can continue by ignoring the critique of everybody outside the circle of people who make a living from it. "Climate Science" is probably the largest of these; but there are many in (well funded) medical research too. I have sometimes called this Zombie Science - because the discourse scientifically dead, and has been created and sustained by managerial-political favours and funding.
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2009/08/zombie-science-of-evidence-based.html
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