Indeed, this is an age of increasingly gullible people, dumbed down, diffident, unable to excercise their autonomy and to think for themselves.
And the credulous fools are not only the unschooled and unlettered Trump supporters who delight in inane conspiracy theories. The credulous also include the so called intelligentsia; they have spent years in schools learning to kowtow to expert opinion and the end result of mind stultifying education is their slavish memorization and adoption of someone else's judgment.
And, actually, experts are very, very often wrong. Experts have spent time and money getting an education in their field and because they have invested to muich in being properly acredited in their field they are unable to admit that the leaders of their field are wrong.
EXAMPLES:
1) Freudian clinicians were slow to realzie that homosexuials could be well adjusted becasue such a realization meant that their schooling, and its foundation, was flawed;
2) For centuries people were sure that the earth was flat. This was the sage conclusion of Ptolomy of Egypt and all other classical and medieval astronomers and woe to thee who dares challenge their findings.
3) When Pasteur said that microscopic germs caused disease, the expert surgeons of Paris laughed at and deplored Pasteur. The expert surgeons of Paris had the money and the ,medals and they continued to practice medicine, with all the filfth of pigs, and blithely watched thier patients burn up with fever from the infections they had bequeathed.
Indeed, this is an age of increasingly gullible people, dumbed down, diffident, unable to excercise their autonomy and to think for themselves.
And the credulous fools are not only the unschooled and unlettered Trump supporters who delight in inane conspiracy theories. The credulous also include the so called intelligentsia; they have spent years in schools learning to kowtow to expert opinion and the end result of mind stultifying education is their slavish memorization and adoption of someone else's judgment.
And, actually, experts are very, very often wrong. Experts have spent time and money getting an education in their field and because they have invested to muich in being properly acredited in their field they are unable to admit that the leaders of their field are wrong.
EXAMPLES:
1) Freudian clinicians were slow to realzie that homosexuials could be well adjusted becasue such a realization meant that their schooling, and its foundation, was flawed;
2) For centuries people were sure that the earth was flat. This was the sage conclusion of Ptolomy of Egypt and all other classical and medieval astronomers and woe to thee who dares challenge their findings.
3) When Pasteur said that microscopic germs caused disease, the expert surgeons of Paris laughed at and deplored Pasteur. The expert surgeons of Paris had the money and the ,medals and they continued to practice medicine, with all the filfth of pigs, and blithely watched thier patients burn up with fever from the infections they had bequeathed.