How Intellectually Compromised We Are

I have said for the longest time that we live in the misinformation age. We live in a period where you can find anything to back up anything, pretty much. We live in an era where every source, including fact checkers, has their credibility contested. And we live in a period where at least the United States has a majority of its population with a comprehension level, and I don't mean just reading, of a 15 year old or younger. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy and PIAAC data on adult prose comprehension, roughly half of American adults read at or below a sixth grade level, and that gap widens significantly when applied to complex argumentative or analytical text. And we live in an era where people are like, "Well, I provided a source, why don't they believe me?"

If people actually paid attention to the world, they would know everything I have said in this statement to be true. The problem is people are too busy accusing people of being in cults, of having cognitive dissonance, or an identity protective cognition, to realize that they themselves are guilty of being in a cult and display those same exact traits. What we end up with is a society where individuals are going to believe what they can comprehend, what aligns with their beliefs or associations, and what aligns with their sense of right and wrong.

Now, I can already tell you that there are people who admittedly cannot accept this because their entire outlook on humanity has to change if they do, where they admittedly say they can't handle how they would have to change their interactions and information collection. And the only thing I could tell them is just because ignorance is bliss doesn't make bliss correct. That angers them, but there is no nice way to say that.

Intelligence is and always has been power, as long as people are fighting each other over the truth, those with the knowledge stay in power. This has been the case long before capitalism, and it will most likely be the case long after. Capitalism, like every economic era, just exploits it.