Okay, by now you're probably familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect. Stupid people think that they're smart, because they're not smart enough to realize that they're stupid.

This is not the same philosophy as "All I know is that I know nothing." (which is, in the peak of irony, used by educated idiots to pretend that their intellectual sloth is actual wisdom), but an entirely unrelated phenomenon. This is the intellectual equivalent of being born without legs in a village full of people without legs, learning to walk on your knees, then seeing somebody from elsewhere walk on their two feet, and denouncing them for walking funny. It is a form of stupidity that straddles and then crosses the bounds into a full blown disability. These idiots are no more aware of their idiocy, than a child in a coma is aware they're missing out on life.

People often uphold the movie "Idiocracy" as an example, but frankly, it glosses over how insidious this is -- the chilling realization that people of 500 years later in that movie don't realize how stupid society has gotten, and look back on the olden days, if they ever do, with a feeling of "novelty is superiority"; the fallacy that being newer makes you automatically better. People used to quench plants' thirst with toilet water?! Guh, those idiots!

We already do that shit. People pretend to be superior by looking back even a decade ago, saying "cringe", and patting themselves on the back for being more woke and advanced. To say nothing of the 1600s -- millennials scoff at an era without electricity and smart phones, and yet our ancestors devised genius ways to get news to other continents, to light their homes efficiently, to keep food safe, to treat disease, and far more. It is on their laborious shoulders that we had the idle time to invent the internet, pocket devices, and other leisurely pursuits.

And it is a feat that frankly, our generation cannot repeat. If all technology were to "great reset" tomorrow, there'd be practically nobody on this goddamn planet who'd know what to do to go on. A few ranchers, a few roughnecks, a few hermits who'd not even notice the collapse, but the vast majority of us would be fucked. Even -- especially -- the people who scoff and pretend that they're not tech addicted, their mother grew potted tomatoes and basil one summer and that's totally the exact same thing as being the son of a farmer who grew up working 5a-9p to survive.

It is not that the people of the past were stupider, but that they were less educated. The people of now are more educated, but in a test of wits between them and a bag of rocks, I'd give it to the pebbles 9 matches out of 10. Education is a coin that is only worth what you spend it on, and as a nation we're pretty much bankrupt.

People like to pretend that if you snatched up a genius, such as Einstein, and showed him something from the modern world he'd freak out and decry it all as witchcraft, when the truth is he'd probably muse over it critically for a few days and then start offering obvious improvements based upon his observations.

The flipside, if you took a millennial and dropped them off in the late 1800s and told them to go ahead and use their superior knowledge to improve the world, would be that they'd starve to death within a few days, desperately hunting for a Walmart to buy microwave meals and a phone charger. (All while mocking their newly contemporary peers for being so dumb they don't even know what a Walmart is.)

And now for the final blow, the last straw.

People of today believe they're smart, not as a demonstrable attribute, but an inherited matter of fact. If you believed that being right handed was rare, and then you moved to a place where everyone was right handed, you'd go "huh, I guess I'm not THAT different outside of my little village. Maybe someone here can teach me how to write." But a default belief in their own intelligence? There's no way to challenge that assumption. Anything that disproves how smart they are, is stupid. Anything that proves how smart they are, well duh, everyone knows that.

THAT's why articles like this resonate with lefties. Not any evidence, not any fact, not any intellectual effort whatsoever. Strip away all the fluff and filler, and you're left with:

Trusted Source of My Own Views

Don't be stupid

People who do research are stupid. Don't be stupid. We're smarter than them. That is all. Also, sportsball player wins at sportsball as we knew would happen. Remember, only stupid people disagree with us, we're smart. Here are ten ways that the new funny person on tv was so funny that you can tell all your friends since you're smart and funny. Only stupid people disagree, we're smart and funny people. Latest news: orange man is bad, and only stupid people voted for him. Only stupid people disagree with us, we're smart people. And remember, only stupid people disagree with us, we're smart people.

AND THEY EAT THAT SHIT UP. It reinforces what they already believe -- that people who do research before coming to a belief are just wasting their time and nowhere near as smart as they naturally are when they whimsically decide to agree with the news talking heads -- and gives them an out so that any scant cognitive dissonance they may have from their doublethink layers is negated. Note the phrasing: "as we're taught to do it".

It's not that critical thinking, which they've been taught to accept as a good thing (and therefore they're so proud of themselves for being so naturally good at by watching CNN and then independently coming to a liberal viewpoint) is bad, but that the system of critical thinking itself is flawed somehow, in a way that only becomes erroneous when other people who are obviously more stupid do it to challenge your views. Which is stupid, and only stupid people disagree, we're smart people. Therefore, other people critically thinking is stupid, and if you're reading this article, you're good at critical thinking and therefore smart.