Are Americans Just Stupid?

[downbeatplumb]

America seems unique in actually making the pursuit of knowledge a bad thing. I know of no other non-muslim nation that so willfully embraces ignorance as a virtue.

[Anomalocaris]

America seems unique in actually making the pursuit of knowledge a bad thing. I know of no other non-muslim nation that so willfully embraces ignorance as a virtue.

America, or the american right specifically, does not make the pursuit of knowledge a bad thing Per se.   They like knowledge so long as the use and dissemination of knowledge is utterly subservient to serving the narrow interests and aggrandizement of a few that motives the lackeys and hangers on of the right.   What they dislike is knowledge pursued for the purpose of disinterestedly evaluating consequences of Events and actions to common perception of the general good.  For they have no interest in serving any general good and would not like it be known that they would stop at no amount harm to the general good so long as they themselves are aggrandize, enriched and made to fuel more secure about their privilege with respect to all others. 

So they rouse the ignorant rabble to shout down enlightened intellects pursuing the greater common good so that a relatively few unscrupulous psychopaths, and their lackeys and hangers on, can pursue private interest at great expense to the public good with no checks or evaluation by relatively neutral disinterested voices.

This kind of things happens in different guises at different times across most cultures, so is by no means unique to America.  Take for example China.  Their popular cultural tradition perhaps value academic attainment more broadly and generally than ours.   But the suppression of knowledge that may be used to check the ruling party’s self-serving policies is far more thorough than can yet be attempted Here by the right wing of this country.   But where things qualitatively differ in China is the suppression is much more narrow and targeted because, paradoxically, st this moment the communists depend more on Successful promotion the basic public material good such as steady increase in average income, in material standard of living, and in access to public services and leisure time, for their own survival than the government alledged of, for, and by the people here in the states.    As witnessed by respective attitudes towards COVID-19, The irony is in authoritarian China people have little formal voice and yet the dictatorship is more beholden to the overall Longer term material good of majority its citizen, while here people claim all sorts of rights and yet tolerate government that exhibits utter disdain for longer term material good of the majority of its citizens.

What makes America dangerous is the length its psychopaths would, and are encouraged to, Go and the collateral casualties they would Accept to rid themSelves of any checks,   and the fact that america with appropriate checks had Previously had been critical to international stability and also continue to possess half of the world’s nuclear weapons.

[Ranjr]

Smart people get smarter while dumb people get louder and sometimes more verbose.