Too many of us are manifestly unwilling to put out any intellectual energy whatever and a large part of the reason can be traced to the far Right, particularly the far Religious Right.
Mick Arran on how devil-dogma, plutocratic greed, and religious orthodoxy renders the faithful blindly ignorant:
For four straight decades now, conservatives have been selling us economic and political policies based on 3-sec sound bites and sloganeering phrases, some of them barely more than a single loaded word. “Tax cuts”, “socialism”, “death panels”, “death tax”, and so on. They have told us over and over again that “liberals” always make things too complicated, and that they do that to bamboozle us suckers.
This has been the origination and the development of a doctrine I call “simplicism”: an orthodoxy masquerading as common sense that feeds into the historic American distaste for mental pursuits by promulgating a philosophical paradigm in which all solutions are simple and any solution that isn’t must therefore be a trick and should be ignored unless you want to be the victim of a con artist.
In effect, it excuses, justifies, and even encourages ignorance as a defense against an unnecessary and supposedly wasteful intellectual effort.
Complexity and nuance just confuse the situation, we’re told. They muddy the waters and throw sand in our eyes to prevent us from seeing that the answers we’re looking for are the simple ones, the ones any moron can understand.
The onslaught of simplicism slung from the political far Right would have been bad enough, dangerous enough, damaging enough to cause the our democracy serious problems in any case, but added to it was the sudden emergence of the fundalmentalist Religious Right’s insistence that God didn’t make us to think but to obey the Bible in all things, blindly believing every word literally, thereby cutting off all discussion or disagreement.
A quote FWIW:
It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. —Murray Rothbard