Agree. But saying educated folk are more susceptible to mass delusion is complete and utter bullshit too.
If you look at flat earthers as an example, it’s an incredibly varied group and includes some highly intelligent amd educated people that have a psychological disposition to being contrarian to the extent it can throw their confirmation bias way off the charts.
On Covid, I have extended family members that are firmly in the government conspiracy camp. Some are long standing anti-government types that were always going to take that view, some are inclined to take a contrarian view to most for psychological reasons (need to feel like they’re more intelligent or better than most), and some have quite reasonable concerns about some policy decisions and have become upset enough about that the rational processing has gone off a bit.
I’ve got a weird half-baked theory (admittedly formed after quite a few bevies) that flat-earthers and other such nonsense are actually part of an evolutionary trait.
It sounds daft on the face of it but if you look throughout history there’s always been groups of people who decide for reasons known only to themselves to actively kick back against whatever the common/widespread Line of thought is. The two most famous examples I can think of is the birth of Protestantism in what was a widely Catholic Western world and the Islamic equivalent with the respective Sunni and Shia split. Elsewhere in almost every culture or demographic you’ll find all sorts of examples of mad contrarianism
obviously we as rational non-fuckwits know through basic learning and observation along with scientific proof that the earth is mostly spherical but that same certainty could have been applied to Catholics in the Middle Ages/Renaissance time.
So my (again, half-cut) theory is that if we go back to the early days of civilisation there would have been cases where entire communities would have perished from such things as continually planting the same crops and being caught out by a drought, or set themselves up on the side of a volcano etc and the mad cunts who said no to the common line of thinking at the time, wound up surviving.
of course on most occasions they were probably the ones to perish but over 27,000+ years of human civilisation there’ll have probably been enough to slip through the net and pass on that weird contrarian gene.
* oh and if you’re asking, it was a mixture of beer, whisky and martini’s that brought on this enlightenment!
