We have such a divide due to the difference in education. It's primarily the uneducated who fall for nonsense arguments and don't see how they are being misled and used.
There is no easy way to fix this, because they are resistant to education and wish to indoctrinate their children into their same nonsense beliefs. The only hope is that with access to the internet the kids will be able to teach themselves and break free.
> It's primarily the uneducated who fall for nonsense arguments
I'd be careful with this line of thinking. Cults can often grab well educated individuals. Heck, I've had cult members proposition me on HN.
Cults don't generally grab members by appealing to knowledge. They do it by being friendly, providing community, filling needs. The people sucked into cults generally get there because of loneliness, trama, or high stress. It can be super rewarding when that nice neighbor you know invites you to a social activity sponsored by their church, after all, what's the harm?
Cults love the "love bomb" and it's effective.
Don't underestimate them. I was born into a high demand religion and I'm pretty familiar with the techniques used to get new members.
The defense against a cult is recognizing how they operate. Most cults do the same thing. They don't start you with the weird beliefs, they start you with "we just love having parties together. We're not like other churches, we're fun!"
"I've been involved in a number of cults, both as a leader and a follower. You have more fun as a follower, but you make more money as a leader." Creed ;)
A bit different but not as much as you'd think. If you ever look into radicalized organizations the playbook is remarkably similar to how cults operate. It's a lot of trying to fill a void and dissatisfaction with society with the purpose of the movement. "You feel this way because those people are ruining society. We know the answer, it's xyz". Even right down to the love bombing to get someone in "You aren't like the rest of society, you've found the secret truth that makes you better than everyone else. If only others could know what you know, then the world would be better. It's a conspiracy that keeps the world from the truth."
The cross over between radicalization, cults, and conspiracy mindset is extensive. Each feeding and stealing the others greatest hits.
In my childhood cult, everyone believes they're the chosen, the ones that have figured everything out. When someone points out "hey, you are wrong about X" they just laugh because obviously those people aren't as good or loved as you are.
Before anyone gets out of such a cult, the first thing that has to happen is the question "What if I'm wrong?". That's why the cult spends so much time telling you to "doubt your doubts" and "everything bad you hear about us is actually the devil trying to trick you".
You can see this in radicalized groups all the time. "We are right. It's all a lie when someone says we did something bad. It was actually this group we hate, a psyop"
The best lesson Socrates taught (over 2,400 years ago) was that the wisest person is the one that realizes he knows very little - a lesson that “the educated” would do well to learn.
What Socrates understood was that wise people exhibit humility. Educated people usually exhibit such humility because they understand how limited their breadth and depth of knowledge is. On the other hand, neither the proudly uneducated nor the proudly educated have such a trait. Of the two, at least the latter is easier to reason with than the former.
I’m not actually sure that “education” writ large is useful for helping people understand the fact that the world is complex and can’t be divided into simple good-bad dimensions.
A number of other things that aren’t traditionally considered to be education would have a better effect, I think. Things like living abroad, making friends of different social classes, reading books by people that you strongly disagree with.
I take it our definitions of "education" are different. I do not refer to academic education.
Everything you expressed are forms of "education", and the core tenet is putting aside your beliefs and attempting to understand a different point of view.
This, by construction, requires humility because it implies that the person has something to teach you. This identical to pure-land view [1], where every person you meet in one way or the other is a small Buddha[1], enlightened with something you can learn, if you only set aside your existing beliefs and listen.
I think it boils down to your definition of "educated". I wouldn't call somebody with say a bachelor's degree, or post grad degrees necessarily educated.
I have met plenty of "educated" people who live in total ignorance of their surroundings, and plenty of seemingly uneducated people who consume knowledge like the air they breathe.
> It's primarily the uneducated who fall for nonsense arguments...
Article:
> Personally, I saw this when I first arrived at Yale. I recall being stunned at how status anxiety pervaded elite college campuses.
Though they might lack official names, formal rolls of members, and designated leaders...I'd say that there are some rather strong mass movements with majority-educated membership.
Education is by far the biggest factor. Do you think most republicans would be voting against abortion, to ignore climate change, to let the rich pay less taxes etc if they were educated? There's a reason it's mainly non college educated voters who vote that party.
These are matters of values, not empirical matters. There's no research or experiments to perform to reveal how to weigh the needs of the pregnant and unborn, or what balance to strike between economic growth and increased temperatures, or how much redistribution there ought to be.
They are empirical in practice, regardless of people's opinions. We know it is better to allow abortion for example, because it's going to happen regardless, and making it illegal only makes things worse for everybody.
> Do you think most republicans would be voting against abortion, to ignore climate change, to let the rich pay less taxes etc
Opinions on abortion and taxes are entirely moral judgements, so if the university system is swaying its graduates' opinions regarding them, this confirms what its critics say: that the system is a form of indoctrination.
Opinions on abortion can be moral judgements, but allowing abortion is objectively the better option, since it's going to happen regardless. Not to mention separation of church and state being a thing.
I'm also pro-choice, but this argument isn't very convincing to me. We don't apply the same logic to murder, theft or even drugs, so why apply it to abortion?
One difference is that abortion is verifiably more dangerous when it's illegal, since the mother's health is put at much great risk. Murder is just as dangerous either way.
For drugs there actually is a strong argument for applying the same logic to legalise and regulate them, as it may well reduce harm.
Because we've seen what happens. We have history to rely on. Do you really want to force women to go back to using coat hangers and underground clinics?
Not to mention the medical issues that pop up where it should be explicitly legal, like with young teenage girls or rape victims.
We have seen what happens when any vice is made illegal. People use dirty needles to inject themselves with drugs/HIV, sex trafficking, overprescription of opioids, PC viruses from torrent websites.
Illegality never stops everything, it’s just some subset of embodied ideals.
Morals are learned like everything else. Nothing is entirely a moral judgment (especially taxes?). “indoctrination” is just flat out the wrong word. Being presented facts and views from different angles then reaching the same conclusion most other people reach isn’t “indoctrination”, it’s just education.
That would work the other way—with non-college educated people becoming more democrat. Instead, you see the opposite: college educated people becoming more democrat after historically favoring republicans, and non-college educated people becoming more Republican after historically favoring democrats.
Also, on the issues you mention (abortion and taxes) the GOP is more moderate than before. Trump is the first GOP candidate ever to oppose total abortion bans. He also was the first to take entitlement reform off the table.
> Ah the old "people only disagree with my politics because they are tricked".
That's not really an accurate paraphrasing, but I guess the gist is close enough. Yes, I think many people vote the way they do because they are misled.
It also doesn’t make sense because the GOP has been messaging to Florida Hispanics on socialism for decades. But the group with the strongest anti-socialist beliefs, Cubans, are mostly second generation now and that messaging isn’t as powerful. Obama narrowly won Cubans in 2012, with 53%. A decade later, DeSantis won them with 68%.
The third reason your theory doesn’t make sense is that the most educated Hispanic groups most strongly favor republicans (at least in Florida, which has the most well developed GOP messaging to Hispanics). 40% of Cubans have a college degree, double the average for Hispanics. For Puerto Ricans it’s 30%.
The exact opposite is a likelier explanation. Prevailing academic theories of race—where Hispanics are lumped together with black people as oppressed “people of color”—are offensive to many Hispanics. Cubans came to America (mostly, to Reagan’s America) in poverty, and within a generation achieved parity with whites. Why would they respond positively to Democrats’ messaging on race?
Maybe not DeSantis, but plenty of GOP candidates do, and Florida is full of Cubans. In many hispanics minds, at least those who immigrated, democrats = socialism = bad.
> they don’t like messaging that portrays them as oppressed victims.
I would think that's very much a minor concern. It's rather petty to vote against the better party because you don't like their marketing, if you know they are the better party.
If you've seen government intervention in markets be absolutely destructive then it makes sense to vote for the party that is more pro-market.
Not to mention that national Dems are significantly to the left of the median Hispanic American in terms of social policy (especially on gender and race).
> Maybe not DeSantis, but plenty of GOP candidates do, and Florida is full of Cubans. In many hispanics minds, at least those who immigrated, democrats = socialism = bad.
Except the fraction of Florida’s Hispanic population that fits that profile has been shrinking for decades. Only 30% of Florida Hispanics are Cubans today, and many of those are now second generation. By 2012, Obama had even won the Cuban vote.
Your theory is that the GOP somehow reversed that long term trend by doing the same thing they’d been doing for decades? And then won Puerto Ricans, who never had any negative connotations about socialism to begin with. That makes no sense.
> I would think that's very much a minor concern. It's rather petty to vote against the better party because you don't like their marketing, if you know they are the better party.
The marketing reflects how Democrats conceptualize race, and that, in turn, drives their policies. For example, Democrats’ belief that minorities are the victims of systemic racism drives them to favor educational curricula that emphasize the structural barriers faced by undifferentiated “people of color.”
But what are the effects of such curricula on minority kids? Studies show that successful people have an internal locus of control: https://www.forbes.com/sites/melodywilding/2020/03/02/succes.... I.e. they believe their outcomes are the result of their own efforts, not external factors.
If you’re a Cuban, what do you want your kids to learn? That they’re “people of color” who will be held back by “systemic racism,” or that people from their cultural group went from poverty to prosperity in a single generation? Cultivating healthy and success-oriented attitudes in their kids is far more important to many parents than welfare benefits.
Also, we live in the age of identity politics. If you’re going to invoke the notion of Hispanics being oppressed victims of a white supremacist society as a reason to vote Democrat, then you can’t complain if many Hispanics reject the party because they don’t like that conception of Hispanic identity.
Education and indoctrination are often surprisingly difficult to distinguish. If one is 'educated' to have absolute faith in institutions (e.g. the New York Times / Wall Street Journal / Washington Post, the NIH, the CDC, the US State Department and Pentagon, cable news outlets, Ivy League academic councils, religious organizations, etc.), while also believing oneself to be 'well-educated' even though one has never learned how to apply skeptical analysis to the claims of these institutions, well, hasn't one merely been indoctrinated into a system of faith-based obedience to higher powers?
Isn't it curious how teaching the ability to argue the opposing point of view (e.g. in what used to be called debate clubs) has been largely written out of the American educational curriculum, for example?
> Isn't it curious how teaching the ability to argue the opposing point of view (e.g. in what used to be called debate clubs) has been largely written out of the American educational curriculum, for example?
This is a huge problem, as well as the lack of critical thinking skills being taught in general.
>It's primarily the uneducated who fall for nonsense arguments
We have to move away from this idea that level of education == intelligence.
Historically, this was probably true, since there was no economic benefit for education beyond primary school. The people who ended up in universities would have to have been strongly intrinsically motivated to learn and discover, likely because those activities played to one of their strengths (high IQ). The world today is much different; there are high economic returns to completing formal education even if one is not naturally inclined to do that.
My guess would be that people who are more intelligent, while not immune to falling in with cults or mass movements or any other wrongheaded idea, are going to be quicker to observe what is happening to them and modify their beliefs or behavior accordingly.
The Netherlands became a post religious society in a single generation. It wasn't education, it wasn't ideology. It was materialism. Capitalism responded to rising wages with entertainment and leisure. Sunday became fun day.
I don't believe it's as organic as all that. There were a couple of very important figures in setting up the idea that there was any conflict at all between faith and science. John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis
They also promulgated plenty of verifiably false information. The popular misconception that pre-Columbian Europeans thought the world to be flat is attributable to these two. They also spread ahistorical claims that the Catholic Church was broadly opposed to science and forbade human dissection.
White was Cornell's first president, and his book, "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom," was influential among the public and academics. Much of it had been serialized earlier as articles in Popular Science Monthly, now the magazine known as Popular Science.
In addition to popularizing the idea of an inherent conflict between faith and science, Draper had theories on the causes of the American Civil War. He attributed it to climate and its influence on the personalities of the people who reside in those climates. He proposed building more north-south railroads as a preventative measure.
Materialism could have taken over thousands of years before, so I don't think this reasoning makes sense.
What seems more likely (to me) is that due to advancements in transport and information technology people increasingly learned about different world religions, and did the math.
If there is only one God, how can other people worship a different one who is also the only one?
Also, religion started to fade during The Enlightenment, and things took a little while to completely crumble.
You think people didn’t know about other gods until they could drive? Technology gives people corn syrup and adderall while religion can’t fix a toothache. People increasingly believe this means that one is better than another or that they are even attempting to solve the same problems and must be exclusively selected. And Science is just as much a religion as Christianity or any other religion at this point. “Trust the Science”, “I Believe Science is Real”, “Science is True Whether You Believe in it or Not”
I don't fully understand the point you are trying to make, and how science plays a role in this discussion.
Apart from this diversion, I do think people heard about other gods alright, but communities used to be quite isolated. It has been possible to collectively ignore other religions for centuries. Technological developments in transport and information distribution, such as the printing press, may have made it increasingly harder to keep a lid on the group think. Seems like a reasonable argument, no?
I agree. Here in the US, and western world at large, we’re even seeing a rise in astrology, paganism, and Wicca corresponding with the decline of the Abrahamic religions. Some just started to ditch inconvenient beliefs.
I see you edited your comment and changed educated to uneducated. It’s petty of you to not acknowledge this important change in your response to me. I quoted your original statement and it’s obvious why I think you had that belief. It’s intellectually dishonest to feign ignorance of why I thought you had that belief.
Mine was the second comment and you had not responded to the first comment when I made my post. As Crzy demonstrates it was not an obvious error. Anti-intellectualism is quite common in the U.S.
Joost Meerloo, in The Rape of the Mind, noted that the ones most susceptible to some methods of interrogation or propaganda were often those trained to withstand it.
Perhaps it's a false sense of security, or the dunning-kruger effect.
According to Wikipedia about the book you mentioned:
Meerloo writes that freedom and democracy depend in part on education for mental freedom—helping children and adults to think for themselves and to see the essentials of a problem—helping them to understand concepts, not merely to memorize facts.
He specifically mentions education being necessary to guard against brian washing.
That isn’t quite what Dunning-Kruger is about. People with less competence tend to overestimate their abilities more than people with higher competence. For example, a person with ability 3 out of 10 might say their skill is a 5 whilst a person with ability 9 out of 10 might say their skill is a 10.
Where was the overestimation of one’s abilities in the comment made by Crzy?
The alleged fact that people trained to resist propaganda are more susceptible to it is only an instance of Dunning-Kruger if said people overestimate their abilities in this area greater than people with a higher ability to resist propaganda. That wasn’t established.
To observe this phenomenon, Dunning and Kruger gave students tests of grammar, logical reasoning, and humor. The psychologists found that those who scored in the bottom 25% tended to overestimate their ability and test score. Most predicted their scores to be above the 60th percentile.
On the other hand, those who overperformed -- those in the top 25% of the students -- also incorrectly assessed their final result. Most of these students estimated their scores to be in the 70th- to 75th-percentile range. But most actually scored above the 87th percentile. While this is also not a realistic self-assessment, the researchers found that this group was competent enough to understand how they got a higher score, unlike the low performers. In other words, the gap between perceived and actual performance is smaller.
So you’re suggesting that people who do not go through the organizations doing the most of the indoctrination heavy lifting of today somehow end up being more indoctrinated? Interesting.
Uneducated maybe. But uneducated about what, is the real question. I'm sure there's something that you are uneducated about, just like there is with all people.
There is no easy way to fix this, because they are resistant to education and wish to indoctrinate their children into their same nonsense beliefs. The only hope is that with access to the internet the kids will be able to teach themselves and break free.