How Did Americans Lose Critical Thinking

[Sympthsical]

18. I still read almost every single day

Sometimes textbooks about astronomy and philosophy, sometimes true crime and historical fiction (working through Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome at the moment, and it is fantastic).

The biggest problem we have at the moment is technology. I earnestly believe the human brain is not designed to handle what it is currently being subjected to. Doom scrolling, where the mind is subjected to nonstop anxiety and dopamine hits in alternating fashion. There's no rest and reset function. People all around me are constantly freaked out by this or that thing, and they just don't know how to turn it off.

And it affects how we consume information. We accept what is being told uncritically. We don't interrogate the text. The only time that kind of thing manifests is when . . . tribalism is involved. Think about the news we consume here on DU. If it comes from an "acceptable source" it is digested uncritically. Only when it comes from a source from "outside the tribe" do people start questioning it - if not outright dismissing the information out of hand.

We have curated our own brains.

It's not great. I don't know the way out of this one, if there even is one. Turning everything off and just reading a damn book is a tonic for me. I've pulled way back from the internet in the past three months, and I feel so much better. I can feel myself thinking more cleanly, more critically, more objectively. I'm not reacting all the time to everything every single day.

If the entire internet went out for, say, a week, I don't think that would be a bad thing for this country.