American Idiocy– A Sad State of Affairs
When Billy Joe Armstrong exclaimed. “I don’t want to be an American idiot,” in Green Day’s 2004 song by the same title, he may have captured a sociological reality about our nation, or more broadly about mankind. If we are to reflect on this sentiment, we need to posit the question, have we always been a nation of idiots or is this the expression of some new phenomena in the 21st century? Admittedly, I am a Green Day fan who has seen them live in concert, but why did it take me twenty-one years to link this song to social theory? The answer lies within the state of our nation and culture, as viewed through the lens of history. I find myself perplexed by some of the overt expressions of stupidity and ignorance being expressed across media outlets and in social media. , Watching the national news has become psychologically challenging, as the masses and the media are embroiled in a war of the mindless that has no grounding in rationality. I recognize that I am not alone in my distress, however when we appraise this reality through the lens of history, psychology and philosophy, we can discuss it in a rational manner.
I need to leave a thought here to ponder:
To appraise a social dilemma, we need to pull from, what has historically been called the “liberal arts.” In our world of “teach to the test” and STEM curriculums we no longer teach the critical knowledge that is derived from epistemology[GU1] , that is the source of the critical thinking skills that we need to understand humanity.”
Ready Spock…Engage
In my examination of media consumption by the masses, I have posited what I call the theory of editorial purview. If we examine the evolution of our media consumption, it is easy to recognize that the amount and the scope of available media has grown exponentially. If we go back to the Shakespeare’s time, the process of printing required manual typesetting at tremendous investment, it was therefore critical that there was strong “editorial oversight” determining what would go to press. Carry this forward into modernity, as printing became more readily available, there was more “parlor literature”
being published that suited the tastes of the masses, but there was still editorial oversight by the publishing houses. As I look back to the television of my youth, there were only three major networks, and not enough programming to fill the 24 hours of the day, the limitations of airtime and outlets ensured that there was a high level of editorial purview. This editorial pressure ensured that the shows that were produced were of higher quality.
When I look back to the work of writers/producers like Norman Lear of Gene Roddenberry, we can readily see the intelligence behind their work, as well as their use of their platforms to discuss critical social issues. Star Trek challenged our imagination by positing new uses of technology that have become reality today. Think of Captain Kirk saying, “Computer how long will it take us to get to Ai Centurai?” Rodenberry may have envisioned both Alexa and Siri in his science fiction. It is a “brave new world!”
Editorial purview and the pressure of oversight mattered when the scope of media outlets was limited by the constraints of technology. However, the historic quality over quantity model created a psychological bias, leading us to accept that “the masses” shared the same taste as the editors. One must ask, was the average person in the 19th century more likely to amuse themselves, with limited reading light, with Nietzsche or with parlor literature. Since there were no formal studies of this behavior, I will bite on the heuristic notion regarding the masses tastes: parlor literature wins out.
From Parlor Literature to Reality Television
As media diversity has grown, there were fewer constraints limiting production thus creating new ways to customize and monetize production. By the 1980’s the number of stations soared with the creation of cable television creating the need for more unique programming. For the first time, media began to be produced to appeal to specific markets. Consider, as a child, my evening television consumption consisted of shows that were not written for children: “All in the Family,” “MASH” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Since most families watched television together since most households only had one television, it fostered positive discussions about complex social issues like race relations, war, and single women in the workplace. I never realized how lucky I was growing up in a time before the explosion of media outlets. I remember my excitement when my parents got cable TV in the early 80’s and I could watch music videos on MTV.
With expanded media markets editorial purview could be laid to rest, embracing the sentiment that the masses prefer parlor literature to Dostoevsky, customizing the programming to suit their tastes. Even in ancient Rome, I am sure more people turned out to watch Christians thrown to the lions than Marcus Aurelius speak on “Meditations.” The media production houses did not sink to the level of throwing people to the lions, but they did produce brilliant series like “Sixteen and Pregnant,” Engaged and Underaged,” and “Keeping up with the Kardashians.” It is a salient truth that the bottom line is the bottom line, and many of the masses are bottom dwellers that feed their bottom line.
The Internet, Social Media and Smart Phones
We literally have the world at our fingers, I can have a tab on my browser open to Heidegger’s “Being in Time,” a second tab with Facebook and a third tab with Pornhub, I wonder what Heidegger would say? Today, media consumption is completely personalized: we can get our news and views from Facebook and chill out watching funny cat videos on TikTok. However, these mediums are inherently different from previous media outlets in that we can become full participants in the platform, sharing our best selfies, vacation photos, TikTok dance videos and our well thought out social commentary that we believe will help others to think correctly. Reaching back a few paragraphs to editorial purview, maybe the world would be a better place if the masses could not share their idiotic, untested ideas in a place where others can sign up to them or be sickened by them. From a psychological perspective, much of this commentary can be explained by the Dunning-Kruger which shows that there is a cognitive bias where individuals with a small amount of knowledge overestimate their competency leading to both faulty decision-making and unconscious incompetence. Reading the idiocy posted on social media, we can all understand why Dunning and Kruger were successful testing this hypothesis. To think, their theory was published in 1999, seven years before Facebook was created, today they wouldn’t need to think twice about the validity of their hypothesis.
If you have read to this point, you would certainly think that my concern about abject stupidity is based the temporal and geographic reality of post-modern America: regretfully, I must inform you that it is not. Moving beyond editorial purview, to an age where everyone can self-publish, has only exposed the reality of thoughts and discussions that were previously shared only within the family and like-minded peer group. When they are offered as truths, they can be polarizing and a source of cognitive dissonance. Unfortunately, the left/right based news media, extends many of these narratives as relative truths polarizing and factionalizing the country, creating what Paulo Freire called an anti-dialogic reality, that can be used as a means of oppression. The bad news is that we are idiots who are easily oppressed. Man can be complicit in his own oppression.
To complete the discussion regarding social media and editorial purview, we need to ask, why are the masses so willing to buy into idiotic narratives? Perhaps we can investigate our educations and brain structure.
Idiocy is not only American…it’s global!
You Skipped Philosophy Class?
If this discussion is striking a chord, and if you have read to this point…it has, you need to consider the sources from where I derived my arguments. I have already indicted our educational system for moving away from the teaching of epistemology, which provides the key components of critical thinking. Philosophers have always recognized that there are two types of men, the intellectual and the masses. Socrates offered that there are men of gold, men of silver, men of iron and men of brass: the men of gold were the intellectuals. When you have a background in this form of philosophical thought, you are less likely to buy the snake oil that our media outlets, businesses and politicians are selling. If you do not, you might want to pursue it, it helps to bullet-proof your mind, reducing stress and helping to make better decisions. What do philosophers say regarding the masses?
Friedrich Nietzsche offered these thoughts:
- In the greater number of men, the intellectual conscience is lacking; indeed.
- The taste of the higher nature devotes itself to exceptional
matters, to things which usually do not affect people, and seem to have no sweetness; the higher nature has a singular standard of value. If then such exceptional men do not perceive themselves as exceptions, how can they ever understand the ignoble natures and estimate average men fairly! Thus, it is that they also speak of the folly, in- expediency and fantasy of mankind, full of astonishment at the madness of the world, and that it will not recognize the “one thing needful for it.”—This is the eternal unrighteousness of noble natures.
Nietzsche had a piercing, at times cynical view of human nature. When I picked up his writings as a freshman in college, I had an intellectual epiphany that forced me to question the purpose of learning: was I learning, for the benefit of employment or was I taking the opportunity to weaponize my mind, so that I could better grasp the world and its challenges. The latter model prevailed and I still read more than anyone I know, when I am not on Facebook or Pornhub. (laugh and insert eyeroll)
Aldous Huxley
Unlike the masses intellectuals have a taste for rationality and interest in facts. Their critical habit of mind makes them resistant to the kind of propaganda that works so well on the majority.
If you’re getting my message, and you’re interested in taking a journey to the other side of your mind, the rational/unemotional side, it is never too late. If you decide that it isn’t worth the cost of the ticket, you will sadly continue down the same road, incapable of separating narratives and tropes from facts as you are letting the masses control your cognition, thus how you think, feel and act. You’re most likely not going to accept my invitation, I’ll explain why.
Cognitive Ease
Leaving philosophy for the world of modern scientific psychology, Daniel Kahneman, in his theories of decision making, explained the many biases that are created due which our evolutionary brain development and our need to make rapid assessments with limited information. At one time it was a tenet of economic theory that “human beings make decisions that are rational and offer us the best outcome.” Modern psychology, operating on the hypothesis that this was not the case, devised tests that would not only overturn this long held “truth,” it would enable us to gauge our irrational decision making mathematically and statistically. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky, psychologists, published a paper on “prospect theory,” that received a Nobel Prize in economics, burying the accepted “truth” by showing that human beings are not necessarily rational decision-makers. If we look back into the more cynical world of philosophy, it is obvious that philosophers observed this from the beginning of the written word. To the philosopher, as well as Kahneman, a few things are necessary if you want to be a better decision maker, you must have enough background to be able to separate fact from fiction, (see epistemology) and you must avoid emotional decision making. I have said that human’ animals favorite sport is jumping to conclusions, when they should be engaging the upper cortical regions of the brain to make a rational decision. In “Thinking Fast and Slow,” Kahneman explains how brain function is tied to decision making. He breaks down brain function into two systems and structures, “system one” and “system two.” System one is located at the lower part of the brain and is common to most animals. System one can rapidly pull data from memory to make a “fast” decision: these decisions are often biased since they rely on heuristics instead of reason. System two is the upper cortical regions of the brain, which is what separates humans’ intellectual capacity from lower species, and it is necessary for doing complex problem-solving
Cognitive ease refers to our reliance on fast “system one thinking” whose heuristic models provide fast, simple but biased decisions., This is contrasted by a “slow” thinking model, that forces us to engage our upper cortical region (system two) to sort out the data and find the best decision. If system two nets better decisions than system one, why do most people rely almost completely on a flawed model?
Psychologists have found that intellectually demanding tasks cause us to experience feelings that are akin to physical pain. If you have ever taken a college statistics course, or organic chemistry, you will recall this feeling distinctly. This emotional distress causes most people to avoid using system two, instead, accepting the fast decisions of system one. Cognitive ease is at the center of a number of decision-making errors, including:
1. Misinformation: People may be more likely to believe false news stories or claims that are presented in simple, easy-to-understand language, even if they lack credible sources or evidence.
2. Prejudice and Discrimination: Cognitive ease can lead to relying on stereotypes, as they are easier to process and more familiar than complex realities.
3. Poor Decision-Making: People might overlook important information or make decisions based on incomplete data, simply because it’s easier to process.
4. Confirmation Bias: We tend to seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs, and we may dismiss information that contradicts them, because it’s easier to process information that aligns with our existing knowledge.
5. Bandwagon Effect: We may adopt a belief or opinion simply because it’s popular, as it’s easier to go along with the majority than to think critically.
6. Halo Effect: We might generalize positive or negative qualities from one aspect of a person or thing to other, unrelated aspects, because it’s easier to form a quick judgment.
7. Anchoring Bias: We tend to rely heavily on the first piece of information we encounter (the “anchor”), even if it’s irrelevant, because it’s easier to start from that point.
The sad conclusion is that most people find thinking so unpleasant that they resort to using system-one that posits easy but biased decisions. When we extend this back into the world as an attachment to human behavior, it makes the masses gullible and easily persuaded by stories that deliberately direct us in a predetermined direction for the benefit of the creator of the stories.
Conclusion
It would be impossible to cover all the variables regarding our flawed thinking that makes us “American Idiots” in a short essay. I have provided some original thoughts regarding the degradation of our media outlets, and the lowering of standards in media and education, blurring the delineation between fact and fiction. I have demonstrated that there has always been a split between intellectuals and the masses, and how our psychology may prevent us from doing the heavy lifting of delineating between fact and fiction. What I have not done here, is the critical explanation of the dangers these realities pose in a democratic nation, where there is “one man, one vote.” I believe that our federalist fathers endeavored to create a model of government that promoted equality, freedom and justice in a way that was never done before. They were “intellectuals” who were well schooled in epistemological thought and method, who examined history and did their best to mitigate the problems that were present in other governmental systems. This, however, brings to the forefront another human problem, our inherent inability to cross temporal and sociocultural, realities when assessing history. The bible says that an adulterer should be stoned to death, if we accept this as the rule of law, it may solve some of the problem with overpopulation and create an industry focused on harvesting appropriate rocks. The constitution is a great document, but time has moved on, changing the sociocultural and economic essence of the nation. We have been told by the power holders that this document is immutable and is held in the same regard as many hold the bible. In my next article I will discuss how we can separate fact from fiction, so we are not controlled by external forces, who hold the economic and political power in this nation, with the hope that we can preserve democracy and not fall into some of the historical failures in other similar realities. I will leave you with this, Jean-Jacques Rousseau a philosopher and author, one of the founding minds of Western democracy wrote in the opening line of his work” The Social Contract” “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” If you’re a little kinky, you might be wondering where the chains are, however, they are in the same place as sexual gratification, in your mind. Man can truly be complicit in his own oppression.
Neil Peart of Rush penned these words, that provide a view of human nature. Rush’s album, “Clockwork Angels,” inspired a fantasy trilogy by the same title that offers some salient ideas on our minds and how we are in chains.
All is for the best
Believe in what we’re told
Blind men in the market
Buying what we’re sold
Believe in what we’re told
Until our final breath
While our loving Watchmaker
Loves us all to death
Michael J. Nelinson
03/12/2025
[GU1]People may need a dictionary here.
A Journey to the Center of Your Mind 