I’ve come to think that stupidity is the default condition of humans. And I don’t mean in the sense of “you start off not possessing much knowledge.” I mean stupidity, not ignorance.

If you study some evolution and anthropology, you learn that the brain is an incredibly expensive organ. Most life forms opt for a lower level of intelligence that’s good enough to get some food in their face and their genitals where they need to go. The brain is a massive risk and it’s miraculous how it’s managed to pay off in our case.

Still, thinking is hard work. I think most people would rather do hard physical labor than actually think hard about something difficult. The brain itself functions like a shortcut machine, too. It doesn’t do hard calculations on where that tennis ball is going to bounce. It makes a “good enough” guess, and that’s it. People instinctively look at what other people are doing because it’s so much easier to let your neighbor figure it out and then copy them. And, yes, people love to subscribe to a worldview, political position, or belief set that someone else is selling and just let them do all the big thinking for them.

You could look at it as willful self deprivation, and it is, but I think it’s also just the basic gravity of pure resource management constantly pulling people down into lower levels of mental activity. Thinking takes a tremendous amount of energy.

And tribalism is really strong. For many it doesn’t matter if what they’re fighting against is actually logical, as long as they’re doing it together and they have a common enemy like some nonexistent deep state that was made up by the Russians to sow dissent in the United States