So...I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other day, and he lamented how Americans are so stupid. And I have to agree with him. Americans are indeed stupid. He sees stupidity as a personal failing, however, and that Americans should try to do better and be smarter, while I see it as a targetted effort by the powers that be to make the public subservient and compliant to their wishes. As such, I wanted to make a sociological case for why Americans are so stupid.
Why people being stupid makes sense from a conflict theory perspective
This video by George Carlin is pretty much required watching on this topic. People are stupid because the "owners" of America, as Carlin puts it, don't want people to be smart. They dont want people sitting around thinking about how badly they're getting screwed as he puts it. our education system isn't designed to truly educate. it's designed to make people smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, but not smart enough to actually question why things are the way they are. In order to do that, you need a college degree. Hell, even a lot of people with a college degree never truly question things. I only did because I'm a social science major who myself got screwed after leaving college and kinda figured out why everything sucks so much. And yeah, I agree with Carlin. The biggest reason why Americans are stupid isn't because there's something inherently wrong with them, it's been a targetted form of brainwashing.
I mean, I keep saying it. Our society is basically rich people making up things for poor people to do for money, and then us gaslighting the poor into working for the rich. And in this context of "class consciousness", most of us are poor. But society isn't really designed to allow for class consciousness. If anything, society is set up like the tower of babel to keep us all at each other's throats over stuff like race and culture war BS, than actually focusing on the real problems with society. And to be fair, both parties are complicit. The right leans into white male grievance, while the left leans into wokeism. And anyone who actually tries to bring society together to focus on the real issues will tell you that YOUR priorities are wrong and you need to get on board with the mainstream BS.
Again, our entire society is designed to keep people in "the cave" so to speak. ya know, plato's cave? And how I pointed out early on about how society is like the matrix? I wasn't kidding. Society is literally designed to keep people in this illusory world where they're too distracted and quite frankly stupid to figure out how things work and how badly they're getting screwed. Even worse, in the past half century, we've regressed massively.
The reagan revolution and the evolution of stupid
While stupidity, in a relative sense at least, has been common in all societies to some degree, American society has really been committing seppuku lately in terms of its stupidity, to the point that things seem worse than ever and society is starting to eat itself. The roots of this can be traced back to the reagan revolution.
In a sense, the reagan revolution is precisely what I described above, it was an effort to make society work more for the rich at the expense of everyone else. The wealthy didnt like the concessions that had to be made during the new deal era, and never did, and they lied in wait waiting for the perfect time to take the country back for themselves. The reagan revolution was their execution of that. The revolution was a long time coming. The civil rights movement drove a wedge in the new deal coalition over racial justice, which led to it collapsing, and the american public becoming more conservative. While Carter temporarily won the country back, stagflation and other problems mounted, and carter lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan in 1980. And then mondale lost again in 1984. And dukakis again in 1988. It seemed hopeless for democrats.
While this all started because of racial grievances in the 1960s, and a conservative backlash in the 1970s and 1980s, by the 1980s, this had become an outright ideological movement. And with this new ideology are the seeds of America's current destruction.
Conservatism's war on truth
As a former conservative myself, I always say it. Politics in the modern era are driven by worldviews. Back in the 1970s and before, Americans were largely on the same page with stuff. They largely had the same worldview and believed similar things. But....a result of the reagan revolution is a bifurcation in how americans see the world. We started not being on the same page and seeing things in similar ways. And much of this change has been driven by conservatives.
We've seen this a lot over the past forty years. Reagan was essential for this shift because he was the one who said what the conservatives were always thinking, but were too afraid to say. He was the one who made it acceptable to be an out and out conservative. before that, your views werent really acceptable in society. And since that acceptance got hold, the movement started slowly radicalizing through the decades. We saw the rise of talk radio and 24/7 news networks. The rise of the christian right. The attempted takeover of our education system. Increased political polarization as a result of that. We saw the right start to refer to mainstream shared political ideology and reality itself as "biased", and the right building their own systems of information dissemination that confirmed their own biases. And that's really what drove a lot of this polarization.
The fundamentalist Christian worldview
Much of what drives the conservative worldview comes from protestant christianity. In this worldview, God made the heavens and the earth, the bible is real, and these ideas are indisputable truths. Fundamentalist christians presuppose these ideas, and then see the world in a way that confirms their biases. And if the world contradicts their point of view, then the world is wrong. period. Which is why they deny things like evolution, global warming, and have such a dismal moral system. It's based on literal authoritarianism. God said so, therefore, it is, and anyone who disagrees is wrong. They also believe that much like israel in the old testament, that god judges the nations based on how they conform to his morals, and as such, we are to be a christian nation. They have a fundamentally different understanding of the country's founding and history based on a set of alternative facts intended to confirm their predispositions, and they believe that since the 1960s, they are locked into a a culture war with the forces of secularism and liberalism, and that they need to take their country back. While some may find it difficult to believe that people can actually think like this, significant portions of the conservative base do, and they vote accordingly, which is how we got much of the christian nationalism behind project 2025. This stuff isn't new. It's been around for decades, people just haven't been paying attention.
This worldview originated from certain strains of biblical literalist protestant christianity. It wasnt always part of conservatism. Barry goldwater saw the threat that such ideas posed to the future of the conservative movement and was against them becoming core proponents of it. But then during the 1970s, the right started getting them involved with politics through dog whistle politics, as bob jones university resisted desegregation, but ultimately what drove these guys support was issues like abortion and taking back the supreme court to put god back into schools. Which is why SCOTUS under donald trump is doing such things. These are half century long goals for these guys and now that they have the numbers in SCOTUS, they're implementing their dark vision for this country.
Fundamentalist christians tend to see themselves as separate from "the world". THe world does not follow god, they do. The world is sinful, whereas they are less so. These ideas go back to the new testament and early christians trying to remain unique in a world hostile to them. Despite christians being a majority, these guys still see themselves as the same old persecuted minority, and act as if the world is hostile to them. As such, they fight to maintain relevance, and trying to persecute them will only make them dig in. This is one reason why despite hating these guys' guts politically, i dont support like, going after them legally more than necessary, because it just strokes this massive persecution complex of theirs.
Seeing themselves as separate from the world, they also see themselves as seeing things different. It's through them I learned about worldviews and despite losing my faith, the idea has remained very prominent in my own perspective. i do see the ideological landscape of america as a battle of worldviews, but rather than be on the christian side, I am on the secular side trying to fight for reason and good old humanist values. While christians tout their relationship with god, we tout our relationship with reality, because we want to have a worldview that is actually evidence based and based on reason.
But, to them, that's bias, and they've since developed an entirely different ideological framework for seeing things, which goes all the way down to the most basic existential issues. We might preach values based on things like naturalism, belief in science, reason, but they believe that's all biased, and, again, their whole perspective is based on the bible. it all goes back to the bible. And this worldview issue, while prominent to conservatives, seems to catch liberals off guard as they keep trying to compromise with the right and seem shocked when they dont understand why it doesnt work and how America got so divided. Well, if you actually read this, maybe you'll fricking understand and realize you're trying to negotiate with a bunch of nutcases. The solution to this problem isn't to compromise with the right, it's to fight them. it's to build up our own worldview, to stand in its values, and to fight for an actual competing vision rather than to try to meet them half way on everything. Hell the fixation liberals have with being conservative lite is why i hate them so much. If i wanted those values, I'd be a conservative. But because I DONT share them, I'm a progressive. I believe in improving the world through trial and error and that most changes since the biblical days have been positive. Whereas the right is arguing for a return to the old ways. It's actually gotten really dark in that regard with the fascism and full on dark enlightenment BS, but that's for another article, or perhaps later in this one. Once again, we kinda gotta discuss how we got THERE first.
Apologetics as a way of spreading the worldview
So, fundamentalist christians are "evangelical", meaning they want to spread their idea far and wide and actively convert people to their belief system. As such, they have a vested interest in convincing others of the rightness of their perspective. So they started doing apologetics. Now, apologetics and defending the faith existed long before this, but we're talking about how it's worked in the modern era. And yeah, these guys actively fight to convert people, and when mixed with politics, move people to their side and change minds so they can implement their vision of the world on the rest of society. Given the intersection with the rise of conservatism, this has caused them to spread their ideas politically as well, and invest in infrastructure to do so.
Conservative media
Before the modern era, the FCC regulated media better. There was a such thing as the fairness doctrine, which allowed for multiple perspectives and being fair to all sides of the debate. Reagan threw that out, and given Reagan's presidency was itself a realigning presidency, in the 1980s and 1990s, the conservatives started building their own media. They recognized that old media was "biased" in that it catered to a more secular and reality based perspective that often had a lot more liberal assumptions about the world, and they wanted media that confirmed their own biases. So with the fall of the fairness doctine, we saw the rise of conservative media with conservative talk radio like rush limbaugh dominating radio, and fox news dominating tv. And a lot of people loved this stuff, since it told them what they actually thought, and not what mainstream society prior to this believed. Like, a lot of people always believed this stuff, but they were afraid to say it, but reagan, being a realigning movement, made it more out and open to actually say what they're actually thinking. Sound familiar? Yes yes, and that other guy is possibly reagan 2.0, which is really scary when you think about it. ANYWAY. But yeah, this is the start of conservatives being in an echo chamber. Liberal media would say conservative media was biased and conservatives would be like "and you aren't"? And over the next several decades, conservatives radicalized in their point of view, while liberals just, took beating after beating and eventually moderated and tried to appeal to them unsuccessfully, because again, if you're in that worldview why would you want the half measure when you can get the real thing elsewhere. Which is how we got the democrats "uncanny valley of suck" problem.
Education system
A big target of the conservative movement is the education system. This goes back to grievances going back to the 1960s and earlier. Conservatives are taught, for most of our history up through the glorious 1950s, we were a conservative nation, and then the 1960s turned us liberal. All of those SCOTUS judges that FDR and truman appointed led to the court to do "judicial activism" which became them developing new doctrines that they didnt like. Basically, engel v vitale asserted a separation of church and state and all of these other liberal cases pushed god out of schools. As such, conservatives have vested a lot of interest into taking these schools back. Given i live in a bad area and my public school system was bad, I went to private school, and in high school, i went to this local christian school that taught me fundamentalist christianity. my parents didnt realize that they were that nuts, but I eventually did as I got older. And yeah, they were part of a movement to develop an alternative schooling system with an alternative belief network. We would learn religion as one of our major subjects, which did discuss a lot of ideological topics related to the christian worldview. I learned about worldviews, epistemology, apologetics. They taught this stuff to us because they've long since realized that the antidote of their BS is college. Christian kids go to college and around half of them lose their faith. Eveeryone thinks they'll never be that guy, but here I am...as that guy. But yeah, the stuff they taught me was intended to prevent that, by giving us a leg up in knowledge so that we can resist "liberal indoctrination." As you can tell it didnt work and my christian worldview eroded and imploded. As it turns out when you paint the christian worldview as this all or nothing thing...people end up deciding it's nothing instead of everything, and as I've gotten older, Ive found most vocal atheists to actually be ex christians who found their way out just like me. And it's never the moderate christians. They dont think about this stuff as hard for the most part, it's always fundies.
But yeah, basically, you take over the education system, you shape the minds of tomorrow. You shape the minds of the next generation, you win the ideological battle. So the GOP has been trying to push their stuff back into schools. THey saw removing it as a liberal plot to turn the nation secular, and away from god, so they have been pushing putting god back into schools ever since. They have alternative networks of private schools and home schooling to keep christian children out of mainstream schools, and to keep them christian. They even encouraged putting me in a christian college like liberty or BJU to keep me in the faith, but i didnt wanna go to college out of my local area, so i went to a more secular institution instead. Ironically, THANK GOD for that, because it helped me break the indoctrination, but yeah. That's the point. They want it to stick.
They also wanna put this stuff back into the public schools. They wanna erode the SCOTUS rulings that banned the stuff in the first place, and bring bible readings back, prayer, the 10 comamndments, etc. They want teachers to be able to evangelize to kids. They push for the teaching of creationism in science classes, since that conforms with their biblical literalist worldview, and encourage the teaching of skepticism toward old earth theories like the big bang, abiogenesis, evolution, etc. Because ultimately, if the world is old then that poses significant philosophical challenges to their worldview, and by that point many of them will argue things like "satan put the dinosaur bones there" and stuff about how the fossil record as we know it was caused by the flood. They use magical thinking to think their way out of having to use incest to populate and repopulate the planet and how that would cause genetic corruption that ultimately destroys the species, like god suspending the rules. And yeah this is the kind of weird crap they wanna teach.
Red states like texas often push things as far as they can. And then most of the country gets their textbooks from texas, so...they end up getting textbooks tainted by religious ideology. Again, all of this to teach the next generation certain things to turn them conservative.
But yeah, the goal of these guys is information control. Create controversies out of stuff that shouldnt be controversies, teach people the world is a certain way, and spread their ideology and take their country back from the liberals.
Why SCOTUS is pivotal to their efforts
Until the trump era, SCOTUS has been hamstringing these guys hard. Because all those court rulings enforce separation of church and state and limit how much informational control these fundies can get their hands on. So people go to schools, learn the truth about things, and become more liberal as a result. It's not that mainstream ideology has a left wing bias, it just isn't designed to explicitly cater to their nonsense. But yeah. The effort to retake the court has gone on for decades. From the nominations of Scalia and Thomas in the Reagan/Bush I era to the Gorsuch, Kavenaugh, Amy Comey Barrett appointments under trump. The effort was to fill the court with conservatives so they could start dismantling these protections. SO yeah that's why they focus so much on the courts. They cant do what they want legislatively until the courts are on their side. And now they are. Which is why they're aggressively challenging the status quo in courts on abortion, the 10 commandments in schools, etc. The courts normally protect us from these psychos but due to a 40-50 year effort, they're able to start enacting their agenda.
Polarization in the internet age
Even the internet has become polarized in the past 10-15 years. I remember the old days of the internet. I remember christians debating atheists, and atheists ultimately winning and converting people out of fundamentalism. But then the internet changed. And to sound like a broken record, 2016 was around the time things changed. The democrats went all in with this woke ethos, and that just drove people to conservatism. When internet atheism represented the left online, the left won. When wokeism did, the right started winning again. I think this is because we were working to counter the right's nonsense and helping people out of the right wing information bubble and cults, whereas nowadays, we jsut bully and shame and cancel people and get offended at everything and are considered annoying. That shift did change a lot and it changed the dynamics of the debate. Because the right are bullies, and the only way to win is to bully the bullies. Which we did. We mocked their religion, we made them look dumb, we won people over with facts and evidence, and then we let the snowflakes run everything, which had a backlash effect. See trevor's axiom from south park.
But beyond that, the internet became polarized. Algorithms started replicating echo chambers online. As did the structure of sites like reddit where subreddits become echo chambers hostile to other ideas. Whereas the early internet had conservatives and liberals, christians and atheists, hashing it out on the same forums, now people stick to their own corners of the internet and radicalize. It's a lot like that angst music video where everyone is on the computers and they build walls between each other while listening to the nutcase in a straight jacket. Yeah. But yeah, now the internet, which was once the source for free and open information, has become polarized, feeding people slop based on stuff they previously engaged with, and further radicalizing people.
And again, woke people helped create this. They didnt wanna debate people, and in cancelling people, they pushed them to places like 4chan where they all radicalized each other. And now we got even bigger problems to deal with than just the religious radicalism and conservative radicalism. Now we got people denying the holocaust and being flat out fascists and nazis. Go back 15-20 years and these groyper types would've been laughed off the internet. But now, theyve developed echo chambers and have radicalized each other, and in just ten years, we've gone from "arent those woke people annoying, and gee, i hate hillary, maybe we should vote for this trump guy" to "let's build literal concentration camps". It's terrifying, but that's how we got here. The worst part is that this was largely unintentional. Algorithms developed not to radicalize us, but to make these companies money. Give people more of what they wanna engage with, so they engage with it, and they give the companies money or ad revenue.
The results of polarization
I see a lot of centrists and liberals acting like we're all in this together and can't we all just get along? No. No you cant. Like, this is what irks me both about the democrats and yang's forward party. People like to act like polarization is a both side's thing. While to some extent it is, it's affected the right and the left very differently. THe left has fragmented as leftists have radicalized into socialists and the like, while liberals are just the same old hugbox of uselessness ever. They shut down dissent, and then wonder why they lose and why they're so out of touch. Then they never learn anything and do the same thing.
Even worse, to be "that leftist", no, you cant get along with the right. The right are radicalized by all of the above and literally have a different belief system to see the world through. And it's radical. Anything we base our worldview on over here, they reject. And they're getting to the point where theyre starting to reject democracy itself and are pushing toward authoritarianism. THe heritage foundation is using the opportunity to push the christian nationalist agenda to reshape the country in their image, and trump's base has graduated from pepe memes and casual racism all the way up to fascist apologia.
Really, the increasing, accelerating radicalization of the right should scare us all. Yes, the tankie problem on the left is an issue too, but they're far less so and they only exist because the liberal left refused to take proper steps to fight the right in the first place. Again, hugbox of uselessness. The other side is super organized and willing to fight for what they believe in, and we're not over here. So yeah, we're dealing with these radicals who believe in christian nationalism and fascism and wanting to overturn democracy, and here we are just...with our thumb up you know where doing nothing to stop them.
How this goes back to the wealthy
It's kind of as marx said, religion is the opium of the masses. Or alternatively, as that one old quote pointed out, religion is foolish to the wise, wise to the foolish, and to rulers, helpful. It helps control people. And as long as the wealthy get their end, they dont care. Again, they dont want smart people to think about how they're getting screwed and all of this fundamentalist religion not only helps distract people from catching on to the real problems in society, it also makes them nice wage slaves. Like, the protestant work ethic. Working for rich people is virtuous, whereas being lazy and not wanting to work is sinful. Serves as a nice tool to keep people working for rich people, doesn't it? Or the property right's system, which allegedly comes from god and has the same force as the divine right of kings used to have. I need to develop an entire secular perspective just to counter that nonsense.
But yeah. Even worse, a lot of the wealthy have F-ed up views themselves. Which is how we got to this peter thiel dark enlightenment crap. The wealthy despise democracy. What they fear more than anything is an organized working class that votes to take wealth away from them and redistribute it to others. Religion stops people from doing that and makes them nice obedient wage slaves.
But it goes deeper than that. A lot of these wealthy people hate democracy itself. They see themselves as superior to everyone else, smarter than everyone else by virtue of their wealth and work ethic and they think they should rule society directly. So you got these guys trying to dismantle democracy, and establish safeguards to ensure that normal every day people can never wake up and organize to improve societyfor themselves. It happened somewhat under the new deal, they didnt like that, and the reagan revolution was phase 1 for them to take society back. Phase 2 seems to be trump and his rank authoritarianism. THey let trump be trump and get the votes and be populist while they organize society to continue to dumb it down and ensure the working classes can never rise against them. And it looks like they're succeeding. But yeah. As I said, I've sensed something darker in this trump second term than even the religious radicals. I honestly think theres a bunch of super wealthy people who are using the trump administration to advance their interests in turning us into an authoritarian state. And they're fine to work with the groypers, and the christian nationalists, and all the nuts, as long as it advances their cause at the end. The end is like the beginning, the wealthy dont want people to be smart enough to realize they're getting screwed they want obedient workers just smart enough to do the work to make society function, but not smart enough to question them. And with trump, they're advancing their interests hard.
It also goes back to why the dems are so useless as a counter movement. They ARE the counter movement, but they're also controlled oppositon. They're captured by the rich, and their learned helplessness is actually weaponized incompetence. They dont wanna do anything to really stop the right. It's just "oh gee, vote for us or the republicans win", while they compromise with them and meet them half way on everything.
I think some are waking up and realizng we have to do something or we could lose our democracy altogether, but yeah, I wouldnt expect the democrats to help.
What we actually need
So this is my thing, but as an ex christian, I'm the anti everything the right is. I believe the left needs to organize behind a humanist vision for society, fight to win people to their side, and change society in our favor. And I want the complete opposite of what the christian nationalists, the rich people, and the fascists want, an open and free society where everyone is taken care of and people can do whatever they want, as long as it isnt harming others. And unlike the dems, I believe in fighting (in legal ways of course) to advance this vision, using the same techniques that they do. We need organizations that advance causes, think tanks. Political organizations that mobilize voting power. We need to take back the courts and other branches of government, and ram through OUR agenda. We gotta realize, the right is playing for keeps and we cant keep playing checkers while they play 5d chess.
And yeah, that's where I'll end this massive spiel. Some people just want the world to learn. I'm one of them. And many people will think i "dont actually do anything" because im terminally online and writing blog and internet posts, but for me, this is how I spread my vision. I mean, what else can I do? I feel like my work is useful and that's why I do it. What more can I do as a person?
And yeah. That's how I see things.
