this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Shit Americans Say
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They each have a connection to the sum-total of all of humanity's recorded information and knowledge in their pockets at all times or hooked up to their screens at home. We all do. Not even we who cherish knowledge use this tool for learning new things more than a fraction of the time that we have it at hand.
Furthermore, education and knowledge doesn't even translate to "thinking." You can be very smart and not be good at thinking. You don't think consciously about a million things you do every day in response to feelings you have, but some people make more of an effort to think about those feelings and some people never even learned how to think.
That's not hyperbole, we have a stunningly high illiteracy rate in the US, nearly a quarter of adults can barely read text messages and are functionally illiterate or can only string together the gist of a written paragraph, and just get by on the wonders of what the brain can do without conscious effort. Verbal thinking, abstractifying information and changing perspectives with internal debate is NOT the norm for most people. You can in fact go through your whole life and have achievements without really knowing how to think with words and language about topics and ideas, and just let your brain write you stories to explain how you feel and roll with it to the bitter end.
We will all fight this scourge of willful ignorance a lot more effectively when we all understand and accept that it's all about feelings, it always has been about feelings, and humans broadly cannot function in a system that doesn't place personal feelings at the center of every issue.
Relatedly, I think this is related to why at some point people convinced themselves that they were completely rational without really trying. A lot of the people -- on the right especially -- have convinced themselves that they live on some type of post-rational plane and that everything they do can be rationally justified. If you point at any of the pile of fallacies about one particular thing they do, say, or believe, they will try to distract you with their credentials or use other illogical arguments to defend those things...one at a time.
semi-related anecdote
Many of the people I worked with in tech that are "libertarian leaning" operate this way. They think because they work in tech that they are, by default, rational thinkers. I would also say that most of the people that are like this are extremely bad at their jobs if you dive into the details. Because, unlike them, I have found that working in software has taught me that I am very fallible and often irrational in minor ways. Programming a machine that executes nearly flawless logic at speeds the human mind can't match demonstrates plainly that we are endlessly fallible, often emotional, and almost never understand the full implications of our actions. But many of these people never seem to learn that lesson, and on more than one occasion I have had them discover "flaws in the compiler" that were simply them being idiotic upon closer inspection.
If you read any Greek philosophy they basically say the opposite thing, that man can occasionally reach for rationality or try to behave rationally, but that it is by far not a person's default mode of operation. They considered it basically communing with the Gods during the rare moments that man could even achieve a scrap of it for a period of time.