chat

I haven't come to any concrete conclusion, but there's a lot of potential factors at play.

Underfunded education, lack of need to pursue said education, then there's racism and IQ tests telling people that they are who they are born and hierarchy is a "natural" part of life.

There's lack of trust in each other and the good old alienation. if someone is speaking positive of X that must be because of X paid them, nobody would be doing this for free. Like the slogan goes: "If you're good don't do it for free!"

Information overload is another big one I think and how do we sort through this, what grants the speaker legitimacy? In the traditional media environment it's stuff like which platform your speaking on, perhaps your diploma. In the new internet media age it's the algorithm that grants you legitimacy.

I might edit and develop this further when I have time.

So the other important factor I wanted to add is how bad people have gotten at tolerating disagreements, which is a crucial skill for being able in a world with multiple interpretations. There's a lot of dogmatism, science has become dogmatic too, failing is viewed as an act of shame, wrong interoperations get you shamed, people are eager to find the perfect solution to the universe, the one correct interoperation. Naturally literacy would go down because in such a world, you no longer need to think at all. If there's only one correct solution, what's the point?

And there's nothing I can do to critique such a mindset, because I would simply be brushed aside as a naysayer. I don't even need to wirte the research again, because people have already done it. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, these people wrote science, it is absolutely meant to be taken literally, supposedly this is something that modernity values highly, yet they refuse to recon with the facts and in their tantrums burn the books, they end up resorting to dogma in order to make sense of it all. This is what the upper crust of society has been doing. If trickle down theory applies to anything it'd definitely be the ideology, not material wealth. This is why nothing makes sense anymore.