this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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I'm sure the millions and millions of conservatives who use Lemmy are going to read this and really rethink their positions.
I'm not convinced most conservatives can read.
The situation with literacy in the USA does more to reveal exactly where and what we are far better than any other arguments about our wealth and society. We have a really big fucking problem here.
21% of adults in this country are FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE. This is mind-melting for the "richest nation on Earth." We have nearly a quarter of our population who know how read words as necessary to survive but cannot string together text to form coherent narratives or even pictures in their heads. They can text with emojis and monosyllables but are deeply insecure about not being able to comprehend longer paragraphs and as a result rage against notions of logic and reason and fact-checking. This is what functional illiteracy means and we've all encountered it, and this is where much of our science-denial and irrational beliefs are coming from.
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-statistics-2024-2025-where-we-are-now
they can; they just don't.
Or they do, but it's more harmful than anything because their reading comprehension is bad and they're a magical thinking type human. So their take away is going to be outright wrong and they're proud to be. Your truth has no value compared to how they feel, and they presuppose they're correct and on equal footing as you despite having nothing to back up their claims.
The amount of times I've had people like this link to a source when badgered for one, and the link argues against their position is enough to cause dismay lol.
Is that better.. or worse?
i think it's on par with liberals reading and refusing to learn from it.
I was gonna say not here on lemmy, maybe facebook, instagram and now Reddit is your targeted audience, but we understand the sentiment due to the fact that you will get censored and permanently banned/shadow banned.
As someone who has had over seven 12+ year-old accounts permanently banned and shadowbanned by reddit for dubious reasons or no reason at all, yeah they don't want humans engaging there, they want their bot-army to simulate a human community but then can be adjusted with a dial to change the narrative to fit whatever the oligarchs want to push.
Tbt I just deactivate my account yesterday. I had an older account that I deactivated during 2020 madness. So I popped in a year back and this permanently banning people for “hate speech” or whatever that goes against the narrative is absolutely insane! It’s basically 1984 or Fahrenheit451.
Do you not realize EVERY helpful message is important, and often shared across all platforms, and can be good talking points with Conservative friends?
Honestly, I don't think it's that important or helpful.
If you have conservative friends and feel the desire to try to engage and debate with them, you would be served a lot better by making an actual effort, understanding their positions and giving them all the rope they need. From there, addressing their specific worries and concerns and asking a lot of questions about why they have the concerns and fears they have... and it's all fears, all the way down. They don't care about facts, they have strong emotions that they can't regulate and their brains latch onto any story to explain their feelings. Engage with the feelings and you can change them.
I have changed more hearts and minds than I can remember doing this, it's not easy but you can change these simple people if you have the patience and energy. Human beings as a group are like locusts, a scourge upon the earth, a fluid that moves to the lowest places. But as individuals? Individual people are largely easy to influence and change, especially conservatives who only hold their positions because of fear of something.
Not saying that it's not enjoyable and effective to make fun of the chuds with memes, but let's all be honest that these memes and jokes are here for us to laugh over and feel catharsis from. If we all actually wanted a better world we would be marching in-mass on washington, arms locked with conservatives whom we have talked to and appealed to their emotions enough that they realized that they can be a part of a better group with a better identity. These people are dumber than dirt, you will get further with them with pity than you will with scorn. I know most people aren't equipped for this, and I was because I was a self-defense teacher, a public speaker and used to debate right-wing people daily. If you're anxious and/or non-social, don't get yourself stressed even trying this until you get more experience.
while i don’t ardently agree with all your rhetoric it makes me feel such a sense of solace to see some of these ideas expressed in the wild.
it’s absolutely confounding how even seemingly rational people begin to emotionally seethe when presented with the fact that shitposting and generally bullying people isn’t activism. seems to be a very human thing.
i think a big part of the issue generally is that people think of their intelligence as some sort of absolute and continuous character trait rather than a discrete aspect of your personality; i.e, the idea someone is a “stupid” or “intelligent” person is of itself, a stupid idea lol. sometimes you’re the biggest brain in the room, sometimes you’re an idiot.
i appreciate your focus on the emotional aspect of it because that is certainly the more pertinent part. imo all humans average around the same intellectual capability, sans extreme outliers. it’s more about how people choose to use what is available to them than an actual lacking of mental capabilities. these people are just as rational as anyone else, it just happens that the vast landscape of knowledge itself is full of many pangs and holes that lead to nowhere; they seem stupid because there exists a seemingly logical perspective that causes them to infinitesimally and continually spin around these holes, like a coin in a make-a-wish donation thing. not sure if i’m conveying my rationale very well but i have found that the stuff in the cracks between ideas like this is often where the calculus of the universe hides in life.
I really appreciate your comment and writing here, but this is where I differ a bit, but it makes for a great segue into an equally important, adjacent point I've been mulling.
Nearly a quarter of the US population is functionally illiterate, meaning they can read individual words maybe, assemble the gist of a text message if it's simple enough and makes liberal use of emojis, but they have no higher-compiling ability than that, they can't read a post like this, they can't read a book or even an instruction manual. And this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, there are vastly more who can kinda read okay if they really try, but have to struggle at it, and certainly can't use language in their minds to form complex ideas or synthesize new information from reading or listening to words.
I think this is not getting nearly the attention it deserves, this should be a air-raid-siren alarm of urgency, everyone should be shutting down the entire country while we fix this. This is because the ability to use language, externally and internally, to "abstractify" complex ideas, to form new perspectives, to review the perspectives of others, this is what is separating a large swath of our population right now, because we just look at it as "stupid" when the real problem is deliberately seeded and far more insidious.
See, this isn't a "fixable" problem in the traditional sense, we're already cooked on this generation, it's been proven that as a child develops they need to hit key milestones in development or they may never have things like full language capacity. Children raised by wolves or apes have been brought in and rehabilitated but they are never capable of learning more than the most basic language abilities.
This is what I believe corporate America is deliberately trying to do to our entire population by embracing anti-intellectualism, anti-education politics. By courting the religious right, by feeding all of us apps and games and videos and products designed to turn off conscious thought. Pushing things like AI that can "do the reading for you" or "do the art for you" and depriving billions from the exercise of forming a brain that can view ideas in multiple ways. I feel like I'm screaming into a void on this, but as people get more numb, they care less that they're getting more numb.
everything you said here is absolutely correct and i’m glad at least some people recognize this issue. perhaps my use of the word rational in quotes was unfounded, i should’ve chosen better/more correct diction.
i suppose my point of “these people are just as rational as anyone else” is a bit of a misnomer and not exactly what i should’ve said; to clarify i probably more aptly meant “everyone, on average, has available to them the same basic cognitive faculties and it is a myth that the difference between these populations has something inherent to do with them as people,” which reading your reply you seem to agree with. i think this is key to fighting this, recognizing that on a grand scale it is in the course of life that these problems emerge vs the exact circumstances of birth. there’s definitely an argument about free will/determinism hidden here and you’d be valid to question how the circumstances of one’s birth relate to the course of your life (obviously, there is a strong relationship), but i digress. the important part is recognizing where these people “diverge” from what we would call “normal” is during life, not at the immediate beginning necessarily.
i like the example of literacy because it helps highlight the point i’m trying to make a little better, i think. most people adept in historiography and history would likely agree that there is a persistent myth that people in the past are somehow intellectually lesser than modern people. this of course isn’t true, but it’s difficult to explain why. to the layman it seems obvious that those in the past could do less than we can, but to the trained eye you can see that people have always been around the same level of average intelligence on a timescale comprehensible to human beings. improvements in average intelligence of the species are a very gradual evolutionary process that we can’t really perceive within the scale of human history; what has actually changed overtime is the sum of human knowledge. thus, people in hunter-gatherer societies were not “less intelligent” than their modern counterparts, they just used their intelligence differently. this is the crux of my argument. the literacy rate in prehistory, was… well, zero; as reading and writing had not been invented yet. but we don’t claim these people are less intelligent, for reasons described. literacy is intimately related to the problem at hand, but it is a symptom rather than a cause. i think we should extend that same logic to modern illiterates. they’re not necessarily lesser. taming the scourge of anti-intellectualism will hinge on truly understanding and recognizing that fact, which is something scientific outreach has done a poor job of imo. that has to do with the natural human inability to do true introspection along with the difficulty of the skill of empathy: problems that crop up in many facets of this debate.
although, as you describe, this is an active attack on us in what can only be described as a class war. modern LLMs and GPTs are another great case study. “intelligent” people are able to use these tools as nootropics and offload even more of their cognitive workload to the computer than ever before. it seems like most, however, aren’t capable of using them this way, as you point out. i think it speaks to the nature of intelligence enhancement tools generally. those who are capable can achieve greater things than they could alone. most, however, will see the opportunity to do less cognitive work as just that, a way to have to think less; and they then fail to properly utilize the tools in a way that is adverse to their own intellectual ability. interesting diactem, i think. speaks to the core of the problem.
i’m not so sure this is a problem we can even solve. there’s an episode of futurama where they travel to the distant future and all of humanity has diverged into two separate species of dumb, orcish brutes and frail, hyper-intellectual imps. maybe this truly is the path we are on, maybe the forces driving this divergence are too strong to be reconciled.
any thanks for listening to me ramble