[jdcasale]

Fwiw, my experience from growing up in deep red America was that anti-intellectualism was staggeringly strong there. People would actually define their beliefs in opposition to those of people they perceived to be 'smart'.

The way that I always understood this was that if they had a disagreement with someone 'smarter' than them, and they operated in good faith, they would lose ~98% of the time. This doesn't feel good. It makes smart people threatening -- it breeds resentment toward them.

However, if you have a roomful of people who define their position in opposition to the 'smart' person, your beliefs are the ones that matter, regardless of what the truth is, so you get to feel like you've won the argument. Most arguments are not consequential, so this practice doesn't really cause meaningful short-term harm so there's no negative feedback.

Over the long-term, this herd mentality is how people learn to navigate the world, and you end up with a giant mess.

[e40]

Thanks for sharing this. I've been slowly coming to this conclusion, though I haven't lived in a red state since I was 16.

Your description fits our current world, IMO, far better than every other narrative I've seen. Some of those narratives feel good and fit OK, but they fall apart at the edges. The idea fits with why Hilary Clinton was so hated, better than anything.

On a personal level, I've become much more wary about seeming smarter. When I help and engage I try to do it in a way that doesn't threaten. I'm quick to say when I don't know something. I offer to help "figure it out" with others rather than preach.

Another comment somewhere in these threads talks about how social media has accelerated our problems by 10 or 100x. I think that's true for this, too.

[noduerme]

This is a very good description of the paranoid, mob-mentality anti-intellectual subculture I've seen wax and wane in America throughout my lifetime. And I grew up in the 80s surrounded by people who were rejects from this anti-intellectual culture, who were smart enough to think all kinds of unauthorized thoughts for themselves. I believed that, above all things, this rejectionist safety-seeking and fearful mob mentality was old and that it was inevitable that its smarter progeny would rebel against it.

It's really only when you look at it through the frame of the Weimar Republic, or, the 60s youth in Argentina or Chile or the 50s in Hungary or right now in Russia or China, that you see how fragile individualism is, because it is so damn easy to whip up a mob against anyone who thinks differently, as you're describing. What is so telling about this book is how the mob itself barely even thinks it's a mob. Most of the time it doesn't even think it's doing any harm or anything unpopular. That is the lesson that we need to learn as a species - not some vague idea of freedom, but that hard individualism is more valuable than easy camaraderie. There were about 50 years worth of Hollywood movies trying to reinforce this notion, but about 10 years of social media obliterated it.

[rsynnott]

I think the current thing is a little bit different, though. It has gone from "academics are bad" to "anyone who knows how to do a thing is unsuitable to do that thing", which is a far more extreme viewpoint.

[jdcasale]

I got a little carried away with this response and it's a little off-topic, but I figured it might be worth posting anyway.

I think this has to do with the nonlinear growth in the human-facing complexity of the world over the past 30 years.

Humans aren't getting more intelligent (they may not be getting dumber either, but at the very least, the hardware is the same), but the complexity of the world that we have to engage with has undergone accelerating growth for most of my lifetime. The fraction of this complexity that is exposed to 'normal' people has also grown significantly over that period of time with the 24-hour news cycle, social media, mobile internet, etc.

It's obvious that at some point in this trend any given person will start running into issues with the world that are above their complexity ceiling. If this event is rare, we shrug it off and move on with our day. If this becomes commonplace, we start to drown in that complexity and desperately cling to sources of perceived clarity, because it's fucking terrifying to be surrounded by a world that you don't understand.

The thing that the right has done really well and that the left has generally failed to do in my lifetime is to identify sources of complexity and provide appealing clarity around them. This clarity is necessarily an approximation of the truth, but we NEED simple answers that make the world less scary. People also, as a general rule, don't like to be lectured or told that they are part of the problem -- the right never foists any blame upon the people it's targeting.

In my lifetime, the left has pretty consistently fought amongst ourselves over which inaccuracies are allowable or just when we attempt to create simplifying approximations. Instead of providing a unified, simplifying vision for any given topic, the messaging gives several conflicting accounts that make it easy to see the cracks in each argument, and often serve to make the problem worse. If you're competing with another source of information that is simple, clear, and makes people feel good (or at least like they are good), you will always lose if you do not also achieve those three things.

In the vacuum created by a lack of simple, blameless, intuitive messaging from an (arguably) well-meaning left-leaning establishment, the intuitive (though generally wrong and often cruel) explanations offered by the right have found huge support and adoption by people who need someone to help them understand the world. Because both messages are approximations of the truth (and thus sources of verifiable inaccuracies) people just choose the one that makes them feel better.

tldr I think we've hit a point where:

- The world is too complex for many people to independently navigate

- People need rely on simplifying approximations of the world

- Media provides these approximations, often in bad faith

- Sources of credibility or expertise often provide these approximation in good faith, but can't agree on which approximations are the 'right' ones

- Good faith messaging often either fails to simplify or makes people feel bad/guilty

- People are sick of feeling bad or guilty

- People associate expertise with being scolded over things that don't feel fair or fully accurate to them

Thus people often reject expertise out of principle, and just believe whatever Fox News tells them because it feels better.

ALSO: People who believe the 'right' things are often pretty shitty to people who don't (it goes both ways, but the other direction doesn't matter for this post). I've been guilty of this. This just further galvanizes the association between expertise or the 'right' ideas/people and feelings of resentment/guilt/shame for these folks. They may not understand what you said, but the do understand that you were talking down to them, and they hate you for that.

[riskable]

You assume that people have the bare requisite knowledge to even accept a simplified explanation of complex things. For example, I said something like, "I can't believe they're shutting down USAID" to someone the other day and their response was, "what's USAID?"

This was an American. This caused me to think back to my schooling and you know what? I don't think I ever did take a class that went over all the divisions and (larger) programs of the US government. It was like you suggest, a simplified explanation (three branches and that's about it).

Clearly, that wasn't enough. Even something as simple as, "USAID provides humanitarian aid to foreign countries in order to give the US a strong influence in those places" would've been better than nothing.

Right now we have a critical US foreign influence apparatus in a non-working state and most Americans don't even know what it does and by extension, don't care.

[throw10920]

You make some really good points in your comment. One of the most unfortunate (that I believe to be true) is:

> don't even know what it does and by extension, don't care.

Apathy is a problem in so many different social, political, and even technological systems - for instance, if people cared just a little bit more about digital privacy, the entire adtech scene probably wouldn't exist.

[noduerme]

There is a lot in this that is phenomenally well stated. I don't disagree with most of it.

I'd point out that there was a lag between when extremely well informed people started to get the firehose of bullshit and when they became able to parse some facts from it; right about at that moment, the firehose was turned on the totally unprepared, uninformed mass of other people, and since that point it's been a power struggle over who controls this out of control hose. But that's not to say that, at some point, the incredible level of distrust among the confused and ill-informed won't turn against whoever seems to be pointing the hose at them at the moment. If simple answers are what people need, then information overload has its own logical way of overwhelming whoever is trying to control the flow of information.

[_DeadFred_]

I'm in a red state and I hard disagree with your generalizations. Even in red red red states Kamilla got 30%-40% of the vote. Trump got 40% in California.

[noduerme]

I think you should re-read what they wrote. Asserting that you're part of a group of people who agree with you (aka conformism) is what they're saying is common in places that hate intellectualism and are scared of individualism. You're kind of just doing what they said you'd do.

Not just that, but your post is almost a perfect example of the attitude which most of the Germans in the book "The Germans 1933-1945" ended up regretting, if not on moral grounds, then after it led to the destruction of their country.