Every generation seems to believe the new generation(s) are less thoughtful, less informed, etc. But when we look at the data we see one thing very clearly: people everywhere and at every time are basically ignorant and very foolish. Regardless of whether it's gawping at some vacuous nonsense on TikTok or gawping at a wholly distorting "news" report on a supposedly legitimate channel, people always want the most simple ideas possible. This is because the human brain evolved, like the rest of our body, under conditions of scarcity. Hence doing as little thinking as possible was for 99.99% of our evolutionary history highly adaptive.

The real question is: why are a few people not content to remain ignorant and stupid? Our entire modern world has been built by the contributions of a miniscule minority, and so it is worth trying to understand not why most people are empty-headed but why a tiny fraction of a percent are not. As we will never change human biology and thus never see a time when most people are anything other than as they have always been, it is increasingly urgent for us (i) to understand how anomalies occur, and (ii) to understand that in a complex inter-connected world of long causal chains, representative democracy inevitably leads to mindless populism which in turn inevitably leads to catastrophe. We may be too late, in our own brief civilization, to do anything other than look on in horror as the Brexits and Trumps and Le Pens and Melonis and Modis and Erdogans of this world bring disaster down upon the heads of their empty-headed citizens, but it would be rather nice to leave tomorrow's survivors with some ideas on how to avoid repeating our mistakes.