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It's always depressing yet eye-opening to hear the opinions of people at the grassroots. The average citizen of America truly is so unfathomably dumb. Even the lower class of the 1700s probably had better critical thinking skills. We might even be setting all time records here.
They were burning witches a couple decades before that.
We probably shouldn’t underestimate the level of dumb that is and always has been a big part of the human race.
Unfortunately the human brain, which consumes a huge portion of body energy, is literally designed to reduce power use when it can.
Most humans will always choose to forgo cognitively demanding tasks.
Not only that. The more someone chooses to rely on heuristics and biases (mental shortcuts that require little to no mental effort) they become accustomed to this and actually lose the ability to think about things with effort.
Now there are personality traits that predispose people to engage or disengage with cognitively demanding tasks. (Curiosity and "need for cognition" being two big ones)
And there are environmental factors (for instance, a family that encourages or discourages discussion on topics).
But ultimately, most humans will not think about something very deeply if they don't feel the need to (motivation).
Those who do, typically are motivated to side step the energy saver mode that the brain typically reverts to.
Critical thinking is in part, not just the ability to follow cause and effect paths and predict likelihoods of events based on information available, but it is the MOTIVATION to do so.
They are a bit like chicken and the egg. Motivation increases ability. Increase in ability means less effort is required to do critical thinking cause you are skilled at it. (Higher skill equates to less effort needed).
Meaning less motivation is needed to override the energy saving mode default. So the person is more likely to engage in CT even on tasks/decisions most people wouldn't. Essentially they start to question and investigate everything around them.
Also I am finishing up my PhD in cognitive neuroscience.
This isn't my area of study (I study perception), but I still have some knowledge of this topic so if anyone has any questions or would like to learn more about this topic, I can send you some wiki links and even some research papers if you want.
It's something I was interested in as I wondered why I find learning enjoyable but so many others literally hate learning new things. Which to me seems crazy.
But it comes down to mental effort and motivation. Motivation must be strong enough to over ride the body's need to conserve energy.
People have always been this dumb as a whole. We're apes who decided talking shit to each other is better than throwing shit at each other. If a few dozen of us hadn't gotten lucky enough to figure out some amazing things over the centuries we'd all still be praying to the god of the hunt to bring back the buffalo herd next season so we don't starve to death.
There's a good book called "Not for Profit" came out around 2010 and describes how the systematic erosion of arts/literature, the Humanties, from school systems, is being replaced by bare minimum to train workers. Creating a dumb population that can't think for themselves, makes it easy for government control with no resistance
School has always been about training us to sit still and not make problems for the boss.
There have been some exceptions through the years, but as a whole US non- college education has been pretty bleak for the whole time.
And thus USA has 70 million voting for a Moron twice, then some complaining when he does exactly what he said he would do. They could not think ahead on how his plans could go badly. And those on the dumber scale still support the administrations plan to eliminate science, health and research because somehow it will be better 😱
If throwing shit was socially acceptable I'd definitely choose that over talking.
There are some arguments, like the "not able to defend himself" one, that are so mindbogglingly stupid that I don't even know what to say in response.
Which might be their rhetorical purpose.