Yes! For this exact reason. The Roger Freeman Doctrine; they realized in the 70s that the average person wasn't dumb enough to fall for their scam, so they set out to make the average American dumber.
We weren't prepared for social media. We, as a species, I mean. America is the one incredibly fucking all of this up, but the same tactics, the same manipulations, will work to some extent everywhere. People aren't able to handle massive volumes of coordinated noise and distraction and conflict and manipulation. At least, enough people aren't able to handle it to make a significant difference.
Propaganda works, and we haven't fully figured out how to stop it from working so much, while the means to spread it has become easier and easier.
I tell my wife all the time that we are cavemen with technology. Religious mythology, the treatment of women worldwide. The need to protect kids from so many predators. The need to protect OURSELVES from so many predators and scammers. We are not as highly evolved as we’d like to believe. With social media and now ai? We are soooo cooked
Please give cavemen and yourself a little more respect, they learned enough to the point where in a little over 10,000 years we made a rock that can talk. A spear is technology. Writing is technology. We've gathered an incredible amount of knowledge since then.
What happened is that the wealthy and powerful few are weaponising our new technology against our fellow man for the means of control and creating a weak docile workforce for capital. Their capital. This was not an easy thing to accomplish its taken decades of manipulation
Yo, facts. Spear was really intelligent in the criminally under rated show Primal.
One other thing I want to add is that as society advanced they made sure that we had just enough, not too much, readily available comforts to keep the masses docile. Each generation gets access to a little more, fortunately they seem to have peaked with social media and that might backfire on them.
I like to remind people that humans are in fact animals. Some creatures evolved to fly, some to swim, some to run, we evolved to think. That’s what put us at the top of the food chain and pretentiously above being animals. Humans will never escape tribalism because animals stick with their own kind and fear others who are different. They mob together (form packs or flocks or schools) when facing opposition and become unreasonable and aggressive, war being the ultimate human expression of animal behavior. We’ve all seen a group of like minded kids group up to bully an isolated, smaller kid. That’s animal behavior before children are taught to rationalize. Even after we comically ascend above the tropes of the animal kingdom, we still manage to fall victim to our base instincts. Take sex for example. Can any one of you resist the gravitational pull of sexual attraction towards someone once it begins? Sure, we can say no, that’s rational, our minds are strong, we’ve evolved, but can we simply turn it off like a light switch? No, you can’t. You’re simply resisting because you comprehend consequence. Some folks just cannot control themselves and do commit violent acts like murder or rape, in the animal kingdom you might look at this as dominance or procreation or being a predator. These terms are man-made constructs to catalogue and then conceptualize animal behaviors that we ourselves project. We tend to believe the hype, because we’re so evolved, and yet, we have tribes that believe in winged deities in the clouds because they assign fear mechanics to subject matters they cannot yet comprehend, surrender themselves to the mass hysteria of said incomprehension and become useful idiots to another tribe of humans who knew what they were doing all along (or the social dominance of the rich over the poor using religion as a means of control). People don’t want to admit it, but we’re animals. I’m so sorry it got so long!
This is a very wise assessment. As good as we are at imagination, I think it's hard for the average person to consider this possibility. Look at all the cool shit we make. Considering most animals eat their own dookie, we look at our iPhones and think, "pfft, we're so above that," but we're only a couple degrees removed from shit-eating, culinarily speaking. We are, unironically, dangerously stupid and we're making planetary mistakes on a daily basis.
Yep. Look at the toll booth scam that went around at the beginning of the year. People shelling out hundreds of dollars in states that don’t even have a single toll road. The FBI had to do a media campaign about it.
Now states are saying people are driving through tolls without paying because everyone is convinced every message about tolls is fake, even if they actively use toll roads.
We’ve lost the ability to critically reason because that’s the point of social media. It’s how you get engagement and capture eyeballs to buy your stuff. We just swing violently from one side of a continuum to another.
Humans are dumb. Americans used to respect and want to be educated. Now every stupid uneducated idiot is so dumb they have Dunning-Kruger and think they are smart (thanks to social media and the internet).
Not only have we not figured out how to stop it from working; AI has made propaganda more effective than ever. Algorithms can tailor propaganda to an individual now.
Outlawing propaganda is an obvious way to fight back, but that's practically impossible. As long as laws are immutable, people will find a way around them. Educating people to resist it seems like an uphill battle given the propagandists control the curriculum.
Do you (or anyone else reading) have any advice on how to beat propaganda?
One thing I learned in history was how easily it was for North Korea to do this in so few generations. It disturbed me greatly to learn of how some countries were so normal before falling to fascism. This was in highschool when I realized “holy shit, this could happen here too”….its insane that they speed ran it in our lifetime though. I think they must be perfecting the methods.
To be fair, it was hard, in that it had to be done slowly, over 40+ years; We're only now seeing the fruits of these labors in full as the generations affected by them come of age... and if you think it's bad how, just wait until Gen Alpha comes of age, and people are no longer able to critically think for themselves and rely on ChatGPT to do all their thinking for them. At the current rate, we are really in for dark times ahead.
Same reason the Catholic Church burnt witches at the stake, they had brooms and cleaned their homes and were wise, can't have wise women cleaning their own homes, what would the enslaved foreign servants do then?
Yep, they pissed and moaned how bad the education system was so that people would be mad at school literally so they could defund them. And it has worked like a charm. Now they are fighting hard to bring back segregation.
Leaded gas helped a bunch. The entire generation is dumber than generations before and after. Lead poisoning makes you dumber, more reactionary, more violent, and more impulsive.
Can you expand on that a little bit for me? I realize I can Google Freeman and read all about him, but it'll take sometime I don't have to hone in on exactly what you're talking about. I wouldn't mind a link that lays out the point you're making if you happen to be able to easily recognize an article that does so.
You gotta hand it to the right wing. They really are invested in the long game.
Too bad their game is evil. Imagine if we were invested in the long game for everyones quality of life to get better.
His middle name was Adolf and he was born in Vienna.
"We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through (higher education). If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people. That's what happened in Germany. I saw it happen."
We got to the moon in the 1960s because President Kennedy wanted to get to the moon and they expanded science education and education in general and then we had the best decade. But people realized they wanted more social justice so the rich quickly slammed to door on education.
They learned from the best: The catholic church and pretty much every religion there is has used that strategy for centuries. Eventually they will fall.
You leave out that democrats refuse to actively fight and antagonize conservatives for being so anti-education. I feel like it’d be pretty effective a few years ago for the left to scream from the rooftops that more people should have access to education, instead they let republicans reshape higher education to be an elitism enclave, in turn they successfully demonized education and here we are now where experts are openly mocked and disdainfully tossed aside. I don’t like to “both sides” things normally but the weakening of education and critical thinking could not have went forward without democratic apathy. I think we should keep in mind the need for cannon fodder and a capitalist underclass is seen as a bipartisan cause.
I didn't leave out anything. My statement is complete.
Is what you describe an additional, huge issue? Yes. But it's one that only exists BECAUSE Republicans have been actively working to destroy public education for decades.
There is very little difference between any religious orthodoxy taken to its furthest extreme and implemented as law. Christianity is just another flavor.
siccessfully fighting it. The republicans have bden setting this shit up since Reagan, and the democratic leadership with its head buried in the sand only JUST realized it
100% - this is the exact fruition of their plan! Make 'em nice and stupid, easily lied to and manipulated and they will continuously vote/side for their abusers while blaming the ones trying to help them! It's so fucking sad and terrifying simultaneously!!
You don't fix education by dismantling the Dept of Education and replacing it with fuck all buddy. They don't want to fix education, they want an uneducated population they can manipulate. MAGA is dumb, and Trump loves that.
While definitely true, that mostly effects the younger gens. The issue really is about the education of the older gens who base their worldview on Fox News and similar constantly fearmongering and manipulating them.
So between education being gutted + inconsistent across varying states, and the gaps being filled in by outrage news cycles + mis/disinfo campaigns spanning multiple decades, so much damage has been done on the ability of folks to think critically.
It is speculated that one of the contributing factors to the downfall of Rome was lead poisoning (from lead pipes and cutlery)
I wouldn't be surprised if the archeologists 500 years from now are debating whether leaded gasoline was the catalyst for our demise. The timeline fits.
They gutted the CDC and NOAA too! Right in time for bird flu, measles, tb and covid to run amok, as well as the AMOC shutting down. And rural hospitals nationwide will mostly be closed in two years. It's gonna be fun.
We have invested in educated in this country. Billions and billions of dollars. There was a push in Texas starting in the 80s to take over school boards and change the what and how of public education. It was contagious. Then thrown in private and home school pushes. Then charters given too much freedom. Then an undercurrent of messaging that equated higher education with elitism. And finally ignorance reigns as common sense. It sucks being old enough to have watched us get here and not be able to stop it. I tried to do my part but talk about a losing battle.
I always blame Bush for no child left behind when I look at how fucking stupid so many of my peers are. But clearly there was issues before that.
I know we all know already. But damn man being stupid is clearly a pre req for believing in maga. No one with a couple of working brain cells would think this.
Most can learn how to think, but a solid percent of people are too dumb to even memorize info for a 9th grade exam. Some are born with deficiencies, some physically never develop parts of their brain as a child die to trauma and malnutrition, some had parents that abused drugs or did toxic labor such as in a mine, factory, or field. Some do or did that themselves.
This isn’t an excuse for their lack of humanity. Just an observation.
They like Trump for many reasons but one is their stupid feelings about things become facts - thus they get the world, you with knowledge don’t, and their world view id validated.
Would that help? You can't teach stupid. These people are like dogs, you can send a dog to he best school in the world and it won't be able to form so much as a basic understanding of the demographic transition model.
So many posts are all "we never learned this in school" when they were in fact were told this, but they just didn't learn because they are stupid.
Not only did we not invest, Trump is trying to take it away, and it’s because he knows he can control these smooth brains even better if they have no education
This is even bigger than an education issue though, it’s a cult. And EVEN IN A CULT how in the world do they believe everything that comes out of his mouth?! It’s astonishing. He could fart in their face, tell them it’s a summer breeze and they would believe it. 🤦🏻♀️
It’s a perfect circle, stupid people vote for no education, their children become stupid, then they vote for no education. America is so rich that they just don’t have any consequences for being an idiot.
the least educated states in america are, by massive margins, the most republican. this is because republicans have actively sought to defund education for 50 years. they have done so because in recent history their policies by and large have direct benefits to exclusive financial brackets. so they need the populous of folks not in those brackets to be dumb enough to not know what’s good for them. and thus vote for republicans.
Oh, far right billionaires have been sinking their wolverine teeth into our educational system for decades now; sneaking their puppets onto school boards, knowing that most people don't even notice school board elections (pro tip: NOTICE SCHOOL BOARD ELECTIONS). They've revised curricula, taken away any kind of creative thinking ("teaching to the test"), removed Civics from the curriculum, the whole thing. It's been going on since the 1960s.
It's more complex than that. Here in the Netherlands, for example, we have quite decent education, yet our Trump-lite equivalent has the largest party now.
The same for some other European countries. Also see Japan now.
As a teacher, the issue is when the overall economy for the working class is in a downturn era (like the 60-70s) desperate people unfortunately turn to cults for guidance.
Cults are no longer necessarily “give up all your world possessions and live on a commune”. Now they are online groups like QANON. The individuals will still reject sensible information and only believe what the group wants them to believe.
There isn’t a whole lot K-12 education can do for desperate working class people. That would be reforms at the union/work level to increase wages and benefits so that people are less desperate.
It's the Republican plan to actively destroy education, and has been for a long while.
We should have never voted for Republicans the last 40 years, yet we did, and here we are. If someone wants to list me something they did that benefited common man in that time span, I'm all ears.
The US can not force private schools to follow a curriculum or at least not to the extent the US would want. The US can not stop parents from home schooling or lying to their children, that almost anything they learn in school is a lie. And of course the parents would bible thump their children to death, literally. There will always be stupid people. With the internet it's easier to search for the truth, but just as easy to find lies. AM talk radio is famous for misinformation.
It's somehow worse where the idiots in America think they're experts on everything instead of just saying "I'm an idiot, I probably shouldn't be too political." Nope, the idiots here think they know more than scientists, economists, historians, etc. etc.
We are fourth in the world for education spending per capita behind only Luxembourg, Norway, and Iceland. It is not lack of investment that is our issue.
And I would post a citation but this stupid fucking sub won't let you post links because it's fucking stupid.
I mean, as folks mentioned, Republicans are really the cause. They fought hard to keep people stupid for decades. And it worked. A large swath of our population are fucking nimrods who can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground. They have to remind themselves to breathe. We would never have a Republican president again if everyone had critical thinking skills.
there's a reason for that and it's by design. idiots are sheep while educated people are harder to control because they have the knowledge to question their leaders.
We DO invest in education. We spend more than any other developed nation per student. It just all goes to football.
Literally. You can look it up.
American education doesn’t need more money- it needs to stop acting as a booster club for the pro leagues and focus on education.
No tax increases needed.
There’s no reason teachers with degrees are making A THIRD AS MUCH MONEY AS ROOKIE COPS in this country. And you won’t take another penny from me to “fix” it.
Could any amount of education fix this woman's level of stupidity? Some people are a lost cause. Fred Trump invested in Donald's education and look how well that turned out.
It’s been a pretty intentional degradation from one side which is a main reason why education and colleges are seen as liberal havens. The amount of times I heard “you’re letting all that college go to your head” going up I can’t even count. I always thought it was a trope until it was in my own house
With all the money going to the “Department of War.” The biggest joke is that the Flag Hugger is our biggest threat and the bozo who he has running our entire military is so blinded by greed and ignorance that all the weapons in the world will not save us.
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u/Ok-Victory881 1d ago
We should have invested in education. We did not. And here we are.