I am talking about the USA here primarily because they are still the dominant force in society and culture. I think a lot of this applies elsewhere as American values are exported.
I got thinking about what seemed to be a paradoxical coincidence as per the title. In America, personal liberties are valued extremely highly. You have almost universal Internet access so you have almost all the information possible if you know how to find it. Yet, you had the Tea Party movement first then elected Donald Trump so I conclude a large swathe of the population are pretty damn ignorant. How can people not realise that fascism is bad for society?
So I thought about why...
I started to think about frequencies. Yes, unprecedented information is available but this is swamped by disinformation and outright propaganda which have the advantage that you can just invent them from thin air. So you have to be extremely good at separating facts from opinion and false ideology. That's really not easy to do and a huge effort can lead to cognitive dissonance. How does one take on two principles into their outlook when individually they seem right but they contradict each other? The answer is that the person failed to understand the two situations properly and wasn't capable because it's extremely difficult to do. So most people stop trying too hard and just seek out information which fits their worldview (the "bubble effect"). That way they can remain internally coherent while feeling like they are maintaining political awareness and being a good citizen. This instead of having an uneasy feeling that things are wrong but being unable to pinpoint why. The easier option is alluring if you don't have a high threshold for pain and/or you don't back your ability to apply sound reasoning.
How can a person be expected to disseminate fact from propaganda when the system they live in is geared up to deceiving them? The profit motive infects sectors where human element can't be given a monetary value. If someone wants to find out about Big Pharma, can we reasonably expect a person to realise that they need to understand the FDA,
shills sponsoring biased research work, lawsuits, meta-analysis, ability to understand academic studies, cognitive biases, Marxist theory, neurology... the list is endless. If it is beyond the average person to pick out fact from propaganda, if they made a reasonable effort, doesn't that imply that something is broken in our society?
I can understand the motive of capitalists (actual capitalists, not just ideological sympathisers) but I don't understand why anybody would hold onto the notion that the efficient market hypothesis is the solution to every economic sector unless they have a vested interest. Why are so many people unwilling to admit they got swept along in the fervour believing that capitalism having defeated communism was the answer across all economic sectors? It's a view that might have been reasonable before 2008 but just demonstrates that people are entrenched and not open to reason beyond that time. In this case, why would we think the pharmaceutical companies care about our health? They are geared up to sell drugs, whether we need them or not. They are amoral on the issue, it just turns out that pushing unneeded medication has bad outcomes.
I could list a great many fallacies held by most of the public and explain the problem. I don't have time so I hope I picked a good example to get my point across.
If people are being bombarded with disinformation and they can't be expected to pick out the real information when opponents are actively trying to distort the field... then isn't there a systemic issue? We need to teach people how to think however we ought to also take a rational view at where the profit motive is and is not useful. FDR had the bankers sit out of the New Deal (golden era for capitalism) and we should have vested interests sit out of a new New Deal. Can't we do this before it's too late and things really get terrible?
I suppose I am trying to normalise a more radical mindset. I haven't actively sought to ally myself with anybody but I think I am part of a movement of people and I want to express myself here and elsewhere.
Not sure how it works here... anybody agree? disagree? comments? It's just something I want to talk about.
