That sounds simplistic right out of the gate.
One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.
I'm a former philosophy student and if there is any simple method for "separating illusion from truth", I'd like to know what it is. It would revolutionize intellectual life, that's for sure. So I'm skeptical that our readers-of-print ever really had the "intellectual tools" to accomplish that.
Having said that, I am struck by how reading books seems to be less and less common. People spend all their time on their cell-phones, and whatever information they find there is just an instant snippet, a few sentences long. Attention spans seem to be declining as bookstores disappear.
It's just another step in an evolution (devolution?) that's been happening for centuries. In ancient and medieval times books were written by hand. That made them rare treasures. Even well educated intellectuals might only have been exposed to a small handful of books. So they read them over and over, sometimes memorizing them. They learned to see how all parts of an extended argument fit together (if they did). Then in the 15th century, printed books appeared, filling bookstores in an abundance never before known. So intellectuals would have hundreds or even thousands of books in their studies, many of which they had never even read. Attention span grew shorter and less attention was paid to each title.
Today we have access to all of the world's information right there in our pocket, but only read it a paragraph at a time. And in the process we may be losing some of our ability to follow arguments any distance and to fit disseparate ideas together.
The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture.
That sounds like warmed-over Marxism to me. The Marxists were always eager to denounce everyone else's intellectual life as nothing more than "ideology", supposedly designed and imposed from outside on the sheep-like "masses" in order to support the capitalist system. That's the intellectual ancestor of most of our conspiracy theories today.
It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés.
I suppose that the author imagines himself as a member of an intellectual elite above all that, the kind of individual who sees through the illusions. That's another basic element of conspiracy theories, they are typically self-aggrandizing.
I've given English classes to a lot of professionals here in Madrid and I'm quite surprised at how many of them are not objective about 9/11 or the Apollo moon missions. Some of them simply refuse to look at the evidence I try to show them. Others look at it and experience cognitive dissonance and go into denial which means they believe one thing and say another.
It might hurt Spanish pride a little to think that Americans walked on the Moon when nobody else could. The 9-11 conspiracy theories are usually associated with hostility towards the United States government and a desire to deflect all condemnation back on somebody like Bush. So there's another element of conspiracy theories, there's usually some emotional motivation for embracing them. Somebody or something already disliked typically ends up being selected as the bad-guy.
There seem to be a lot of closed-minded literate people who don't seem to know how to come to a logical conclusion.
True. I don't think that being literate or having lots of years of education necessarily makes somebody smarter, more logical or a better thinker. Ph.D.'s put in a lot of work to earn their doctorates, but it's usually focused around a tiny research problem. There's no guarantee that specialists are more capable than any of the rest of us, the further they stray from the narrow topic of their expertise.
