I am American. The answer is both a Yes and a No. It doesn’t have so much to do with stupidity, but that our education system has been slowly dismantled since the 90’s. Rather than teaching civics, critical thinking, and basic knowledge about government, economics and their inner workings we’ve setup a system that favors test scores and nothing else. Has that made people more stupid? Possibly, but I think it has more to do with only learning the answers rather than how to get there. There’s just this huge in-between of information that a lot of people don’t seem to be able to work out on their own without having a lot of hints of what the outcome will be. It saddens me to see people’s gears just come to a grinding halt trying to work out simple solutions on things.
I think the biggest bane in America is our work culture. We’ve setup a dog eat dog system of trying to strive for the most success at any cost. Work culture in America is fickle, back stabby, and rife with favoritism over quality of work. The biggest lie we were ever told was that we could be the next Bill Gates, or Elon Musk, or some other rich billionaire mogul. The biggest lie we were ever told was to invest in the stock market and have a 401k. The biggest lie we were ever told is that if we worked our asses off that we’d automatically be successful. America is just a grindhouse that treats the working class like shit and unless you decide to be a bridge burning greedy fucking asshole you’ll never really get anywhere with any real upward mobility.
Lastly, I will say that America and American’s themselves has become more and more isolationist in the last couple of decades. Maybe it is social media and the echo chambers they cause. Maybe it is the fake friendships and feeling like you are just collecting trading cards instead of making real insightful and meaningful relationships. Maybe it is the dog eat dog work culture or the keeping up with the Jones’s mentality of things like Instagram and Facebook. Maybe it is a bit of everything. The fact remains that there is a huge friendship pandemic in this country and it only gets worse and worse as many of us further isolate ourselves from reality, critical thinking, and the prospect of being really challenged by the people we could be surrounding ourselves with.
All of this has culminated in a culture that is becoming more work and money focused, less people and social relationship focused, and by and large more shallow and less well rounded and interesting overall. No generation is immune from it either. Whether you are young or old you can fall victim to all I’ve outlined above. Most people have let the technology and systems in place take away their freedom of thought and originality to instead become a husk of the human potential they once were or could be again because it is easier to fall prey to hive mind apathy and cynicism than to fight for your own uniqueness and truer sense of self.
The Broodwich.