Consider this:
When the U.S. Constitution was drafted human beings were entirely capable of comprehensively understanding nearly every aspect of how the world around them worked.
How to grow food. Run a business. Understand emerging topics in science, math, philosophy and the arts. The optimism running through the renaissance thinkers is not surprising.
The drafters of the Constitution were masters of their world (to often unfortunately include slaves). They were confident in their direction moving into the future because they could predict the future --- based on their comprehensive knowledge of their present.
@LeftistLawyer
See also medieval Iceland, where every year on Law Day the lawspeaker would recite all the laws then in effect. Can you imagine one person knowing all the laws today?
That's a major problem for everyone. Hell, i don't draw a line between "the elite" and the rest of us. Lords and peasants in the power structure, but as far as wisdom or thoughtfullness goes, as far as education can be measured, people deeply schooled in one area don't seem so elite any more. Linguists, maybe. They seem to produce thinkers who can put a finger on a pulse. But i digress...
It takes an assload of just basic knowledge to understand today's world:
Aside from all the various ways to learn about the "human condition", the liberal arts stuff that is timeless, today's adults need to know at least the basics of computers and computer logic, this week's software suite, geology/ planetology/ climate science, biology/ evolution/ dna/CRISPr, chemistry and biochem, probably quantumn physics soon enough. There's a fuckload of raw facts everyone has to cobble into a worldview for it to be at all accurate.
Now admix the fact that everyone also needs to understand epistemology, and cognitive biases, and journalistic ethics, and the scientific method in order to not be misled by ever more sophisticated propaganda and lies--is it any wonder people give up and just treat the universe as an unknowable mystery? I knew a flat earther. He'd obviously given up and slotted in whatever fantasy worked for him. I'm sure it's seductive to abandon critical thought...
...abandon critical thought and just let someone else tell you what's real and what isn't. There's a preacher on every block just begging for the job. You're not /supposed/ to do your own thinking. No peasant in history was allowed until recently. You had to think what the preacher, or the lord, told you to.We've got millennia of natural selection pushing toward mindlessness and only a couple generations in the western world who even had the option of chasing real facts.
@Uair@LeftistLawyer it is fun to think we jumped tracks and are in this wrong parallel universe. Or a matrix that’s gotten glitchy and needs a reboot or a patch for the bugs. The billionaire bug is the worst.
This reminds me of some of what Richard Feynman said about what it means to be a good scientist.
He talked about you being the easiest person for you to fool and therefore you had to take extra care not to fool yourself (bend-over-backwards honesty).
I think he also talked about how politicians did not want to listen to scientists because they were honest about not knowing something for sure.
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