cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2313987
I have noticed that alot of people think the majority of people are stupid based on the things they read online or maybe even experience in real life but I think that there is better explanation than just assuming people are stupid.
A common example people bring up to show that other people are stupid is mentioning how a lot of people believe in conspiracy theories ( such as Qanon or Flat earth) and point out how they are objectively false therefore the people that believe it are stupid.
However when you examine these beliefs in more depth there is obviously some amount of internal logic that is used to justify these beliefs to themselves and others in the group.
You can go to flat earthers forum and they can give huge amounts of “evidence” about how light shouldn’t be visible after 50 kms if the earth was round or how in Qanon there are probably people who have whole boards detailed with connections between how and where democrats participate in satanic rituals but my point is that all conspiracy theories tend to form one cohesive narrative like a collective story that are building.
To be able to make a story that is this detailed it definitely required some amount of forethought and reasoning to make it so everyone in the group reaches the same collective understanding.
This then might lead you to ask why are people susceptible to these ideas and what makes them stick. Well I think that it boils down to three different things.
- Our collective feeling that things aren’t going well
- Our general distrust in current authorities
- Our collective belief that an authority is good/necessary
When you look at how people tend to be influenced into accepting these beliefs it also follows this same general pattern.
- People feel that some part of their life isn’t going well and that current institutions aren’t helping them anymore.
- A guru/influencer shows up and offers advice (sometimes good advice) to fix their problem
- People then start trusting these gurus/influencers and seeing them as authorities
- Finally these people take what these gurus/influencers say at face value and build internal lore for their community that makes sense to them given that they accept what the new authority says as fact.
If you want to tackle the root of what makes people susceptible to these ideas you have to tackle those three things or else people will fall into those same traps just with different authorities saying different things.
Also as a semi-related point there are a million and one things that an individual can choose to focus on and become knowledgable about so whilst some people spend that mental capacity on understanding tech or politics others spend that mental capacity on flat earth theory or UFOs.
Main point:
So all of this is to say I think that people aren’t stupid and that we should not treat them as they are such instead if we understand that they are capable of complex reason but they are starting with different base knowledge it’ll be easier to empathize with others. Also if we want society to be less susceptible to this we need to fix one or all of the three things I mentioned that makes us susceptible.
I take the opposite stance.
People are stupid. All people. No exceptions. Yes, this includes you, the person reading. Yes, this includes me, the person writing1.
Every person on the face of Planet Earth (and the tiny handful currently in orbit around her) exhibits maladaptive2 belief, reasoning, and/or behaviour. Again, no exceptions.
And we can’t help it. The world is too large, too complicated, for our poor little brains to cope with. We can actively cope with ±7 “things” at any given moment on average. Much of our cognitive processing is spent juggling around the currently active number of “things” we’re thinking about. Honestly it’s kind of amazing that we’ve accomplished as much as we have given that 7 is a shockingly small number compared to the number of “things” in our worlds at any given instant.
So here we are, thinking pieces of meat, with a woefully inadequate stack of “things” we can think about at any given time living in a world that overwhelms that capacity by hundreds of orders of magnitude. To cope with it we group “things” into bigger “things”, losing detail in the process, and thus begins one of the bigger pieces of stupidity: stereotyping. Again, note, this is inevitable. You are doing it right this very instant as you form some picture of who is typing these words, what this person is like, and likely even assigning moral characteristics to the person. You can’t help it. (And I can’t help forming a stereotyped mental picture of the person reading this.) But this goes far beyond just stereotyping. This is at the foundation of why we cling to outdated and objectively incorrect beliefs which are maladaptive in the modern world. And no, I don’t mean (just) religion here.
So all of this is to say that people are, in fact, quite stupid. Including you. Including me. We should treat them as if they were. Including ourselves. (That last point being the key one.) Because we are stupid we should be far more humble about what we think we “know” and more open to listening to the stupidity of others. Because here’s the trick that has allowed us to survive for as long as we have: everybody, stupid as we are, also has something we’re not quite as stupid in. And on those humble bits of less-stupidity are edifices of intelligence built. And if you have the humility to listen to the stupidity of others, you’ll stumble across the occasional gem of true intelligence … and you’ll learn.
1 I mean here I am trying to convince you you’re an idiot. That’s about the dumbest thing I can imagine wasting my morning doing!
2 Here meaning ‘contrary to the accomplishment of desirable outcomes up to and including continued existence’.
I think you would like this video.
Edit: by the way I think you bring an interesting viewpoint and I thank you for the effort put into this comment.
That is an interesting video, yes.
I agree. For crying out loud, my account is a memory of a meme, of course I’m stupid as shit.
I think humans are heuristic creatures. And we often determine what’s real and not real by our social peers. The online echo chambers driven by algorithms, or even people just hanging out with like-minded people, removes a lot of that peer pressure.
So the flat earther spends all of their time online with other flat earthers, their peers encourage them. Which is an important human metric. So they’re not getting the natural feedback they’ve normally get
