We have become a nation of muddled thinkers.
There is too much information coming at us 24/7, non stop, thanks to instantly accessible devices such as our phones.
So we bring a lot of unrelated things together and think it makes sense. We also hail conspiracy theories and super heroes because they are in movies, which we think are real. Paranoia runs rampant thanks to crazy people posting crazy ideas that literally thousands of people read. There are doctored photographs and fake documents. We have a great deal of difficulty sorting it all out.
Our education system failed us. Never taught us how to think logically, to solve problems. It taught us how to memorize and passed that off as proving we are smart. We cannot discern fact from fiction, we have not learned how to read a person or a book. We have not learned how to separate emotion from logic. We cannot reason. It is a skill that is lost.
There are people who think eggs, milk and cheese come from plants. There are people who still believe the world is flat. That pollution doesn’t exist. That Trump never lies (really!!).
Part of the problem is we are emotional creatures. We respond to feelings. This is left over from our very primitive beginnings before we had language or the written word. We communicated with emotions. We are also visual beings, an image can have a lasting impact on us. Combine visual with emotion and you have people blindly led to slaughter. It once saved us from predators, now it feeds us to them.
So we are greatly influenced by advertisements and cleverly created videos, and people who can speak with passion.
If you speak with passion you can win the hearts of many. Just look at Trump. He can’t even say most of the words, and if you read the transcripts, it doesn’t even make sense. Yet people buy the insanity because there is emotion behind it.
The other thing that muddles us is we are juveniles.
Yes, many are still children, wanting to be rescued and taken care of by Daddy. Without an adult brain, people do not know how to survive on their own. We are not resilient. We are wimps, whining about the most stupidest of things, to going outright ballistic about inconsequential meaningless events. We expect others to do things for us. We are babies. Some of these babies endanger others, like demanding their employees go back into a burning building to rescue a painting (really, this just recently happened) and then fired them and condemned them on the internet. What the fuck are we thinking?
Once I attended a classical music pre-concert get together, where we got to meet the conductor and some of the musicians and hear some talks and ask some questions. The conductor related a story that a man threatened to kill him because he played Beethoven’s 5th symphony too slow! He actually had to be put under police protection for a while!
I have seen internet postings of people having meltdowns because they didn’t get ketchup with their fries. And of course, we have all seen Bridezillas wreaking havoc with virtually everyone in sight.
This is all very muddled, juvenile thinking, dangerous thinking. Which leads us to very muddled, juvenile, dangerous actions.
And look at where it is taking us.
Scary indeed.