Shallow thinking and arrogance led to ruin of once-great society

By David McElroy · December 18, 2018

It must be nice to pick a political “team” and then never again bother to question whether your team’s beliefs might be fundamentally flawed.

It must be nice to do a shallow scan of everything you encounter and look for anything you disagree with — so you can use that as an excuse to disregard everything else a person might be trying to say. It must be convenient to know you don’t have to bother considering anything you don’t already believe is true.

American society is still pretty good at doing things and making things. We have better tools and technology than ever for molding physical objects into what we want them to be. (Those are an extension of open inquiry by previous generations.) But we are failing on a deeper level — and we are heading toward a devastating collapse — because we have become intellectually shallow and morally arrogant.

We are rushing over a cliff as fast as we can — and everybody can point a finger at someone else to blame.

When I was young and arrogant myself, I knew everything. My beliefs were absolutely certain — and they were based on what other people had told me to believe. I didn’t realize that, of course. It just didn’t seem to occur to me for a long time that I had happened to be born into the one social, political and religious group which had perfect knowledge about everything.

Eventually, I saw the errors of my shoddy thinking and blind faith in others, so I wanted to share what I had learned with others. For awhile, I made the same mistake again, just from a different point of view. I again believed I had all truth. I just had to get other people to accept what I’d found.

Then I moved into a more reasonable phase. I just wanted to get others to think clearly about what they believed — about why they believed things and where those ideas came from. I wanted them to understand that we should all question where we can from and that we should all think for ourselves.

That didn’t work any better than any of my previous attempts.

Today, I’m just numb to the intellectual blindness and arrogance of most people. That doesn’t mean I consider all those who disagree with me to be blind and arrogant, though. There are a rare few among those who I disagree with who I’ve had respect for, because they’ve attempted to explore truth in a more humble way. And there are those among my would-be allies who are some of the most intellectually blind and arrogant I’ve known.

The last couple of generations of Americans — roughly speaking — have increasingly been taught that everybody’s “truth” is equally valid, so everybody’s thoughts and ideas — no matter how stupid — are supposed to be valued. People have grown up being praised for terrible and shallow thoughts — instead of being pushed to think more deeply and rationally — so they never bothered to learn how to be intellectually humble or to approach issues with a genuine desire to learn.

This has created a culture in which almost everyone has an opinion about almost everything, but the vast majority of opinions about any issue are shallow and stupid. (Oh, no. I’m not supposed to say that. Everybody’s ideas are equal, right?)

It’s a waste of time trying to share something insightful with most people — such as posting a thoughtful article on social media — because they have one of several different reactions.

The dirty little secret is that almost nobody reads the article.

Most people who see it are indifferent to learning what someone else has to say about an issue, because they already know what they believe. They have joined a political or social team somewhere along the way — and that group has already made it clear what “we” think. So these people have an opinion that someone else has given them and they have no interest in anything they might not have already considered.

Another group of people see the headline and click “share” without bothering to read the article. They agree with the headline and they want to promote the point of view they already agree with, so they mindlessly share.

Yet another group see the general subject matter of the article and proceed to post comments explaining what they already think, especially if they disagree with the headline. They don’t bother to read the article and if they skim it, it’s only to find something they disagree with — so they can dismiss the whole thing. They’re most interested in explaining why someone is wrong, even if they haven’t read what the person wrote.

Almost everybody has decided what he believes, so people no longer read for nuance or substance they might not have thought about. It’s a very shallow existence, but it’s all most people know today when it comes to controversial topics.

I used to be angry about this trend. I used to think I could shame people into seeing the shallowness of living this way. (It was desperation.) But that didn’t work. Nobody cares.

Ideas control the world. If you have given your thoughts and beliefs over to someone else without understanding the ideas which underlie what you’ve accepted, you are being used by an idea which you don’t understand — and you don’t even know that.

Are you one of those people? How many times in your life have you decided that some of your most important beliefs were wrong? How often have you had to go through serious intellectual change because you’ve realized you had been completely mistaken about things you were taught or things you had concluded on your own?

The fewer times this has happened to you, the more likely you’re one of those people. If you’ve gone through the painful process of changing your ideas multiple times — about things of major important to you — there’s a better chance that you’re thinking for yourself.

American society used to be a caldron of ideas and genuine debate. Many people read deeply and then debated in highly rational ways. Today, it’s a bunch of shallow and arrogant children yelling insults at one another.

We’re willingly going over a cliff blindly — and I’ve become numb to my fear about where it’s taking us, because I have absolutely no idea how to convince an entire society to start taking ideas seriously again.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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