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SatanBurger Very interesting assessment.
Perhaps the lack of learned skills is due to many people not even realising the nature of thinking as you describe. So their way of becoming comfortable is to latch onto ideas that seem "right" emotionally without stopping to consider if they are "right" in fact and logic.
They find others who agree with their ideas and so become drawn into hermetic, cult-like circles that abjure and oppose any others, because the others make them uncomfortable.
You mention the witch hunts, and these do have a technical parallel with the rise of the Internet.
The 15C German Catholic clergyman, Heinrich Kramer, wrote a particularly unpleasant book called
Malleus Maleficarum ("Hammer of the Witches"), an anthology of demonology and the like. Despite it being heavily criticised by many leading bishops and theologians of its time, it was heavily responsible for the wave of fear-driven persecutions that swept across Europe until the late 17C. They didn't need the Inquisition either, the Church of Rome's theological "security branch", as the witch-hunts continued just as zealously in the post-Reformation, Protestant countries.
The technical parallel? This was not long after the invention of printing by Caxton, furthered by Gutenburg; allowing books to be copied and published far more widely and rapidly than hitherto possible.
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It is heavy going, but have you read Charles Mackay's
Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds?
Mackay was a 19C journalist and historian who studied those very things, including the Witch Mania, Alchemy, and the South Sea Bubble. All linked by mass-delusion; but its notable that some of these had their doubters even at their height.
Do these three have parallels now?
- Imagined "witches" are safe now, in most countries anyway; but what of the on-line persecution of people for expressing opinions not shared by the [at]-Hermetic-Anonymous brigade?
- Alchemy was pushed away, gradually, by its own obvious failures and by the Age of Enlightenment bringing rational, scientific method and thought; but those qualities are now threatened by assorted anti-knowledge, anti-science campaigns with their own motives.
- The "Bubble" share-dealings collapse even has its digital-age descendants with the banking crisis several years ago, and the precarious nature of "Bitcoin": mass speculation and greed overtaking analysis, to become unsustainable.
Heavy-going only by its prose style of the time; but a book to be considered in the light of the grimmer aspects of "social[?]-media", and looked at with your insight.
