Two Reasons for Public Ignorance



PLAYBOY: Indians on reservations are more neglected than cared for. Even if you accept the principle of expropriation, don’t you think a more humane solution to the Indian problem could have been devised?

WAYNE: This may come as a surprise to you, but I wasn’t alive when reservations were created — even if I do look that old. I have no idea what the best method of dealing with the Indians in the 1800s would have been. Our forefathers evidently thought they were doing the right thing.

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about the government grant for a university and cultural center that these Indians [occupying Alcatraz] have demanded as “reparations”?

WAYNE: What happened between their forefathers and our forefathers is so far back — right, wrong or indifferent — that I don’t see why we owe them anything. I don’t know why the government should give them something that it wouldn’t give me.

The second problem, related to the first, is what I call self-centeredness, the idea of only YOUR personal issues being important to you because you lack empathy for others, past and present. This may also be known as anti-holism, when you are focused on your immediate and personal concerns so much that you never think of how society as a whole may be affected by what you want as opposed to what others want. Instead of seeking “win-win” solutions, you only want to win and make others lose!


The United States is the richest nation in the world. Case in point, we have toilets everywhere, including in nearly all of our homes. But there are millions of people in other parts of the world that are so impoverished that they do not even have toilets. Instead, they practice open defecation, often in the same lakes and rivers they must bathe in and drink from, resulting in exposure to any number of diseases.

Meanwhile, in that supposedly rich country I live in:

#3. The Rural Areas Have Been Beaten To Shit

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Don’t message me saying all those things I listed are wrong. I know they’re wrong. Or rather, I think they’re wrong, because I now live in a blue county and work for a blue industry. I know the Good Old Days of the past were built on slavery and segregation, I know that entire categories of humanity experienced religion only as a boot on their neck. I know that those “traditional families” involved millions of women trapped in kitchens and bad marriages. I know gays lived in fear and abortions were back-alley affairs.

I know the changes were for the best.

Try telling that to anybody who lives in Trump country.

Mark Makela/Getty Images


Economic Innovation Group
They could all move to Vegas, but then there’s that whole “decadence and apocalypse” thing.


I totally get that! But I am willing to bet that the people in the so-called Third World that practice shitting in their own water supply because they have to would trade places with those impoverished rural Americans in a heartbeat. Because rural Americans only see their own poverty (and remember that poverty is a relative thing, because the white corporate rulers in the big cities are far richer than them), they feel miserable. But they still have toilets.




Malaria Deaths

Cholera Deaths




Yellow Fever




HIV Prevalence



Physicians Working


Wealth Year 2015

The projected wealth of China in 2015 could mean it producing 27% of all the wealth in the world, if the economic trends established between 1975 and 2002 continue for another 13 years. In year 1 of the current era China produced 26% of the wealth in the world, but very slowly declined to generating only 5% of the world total in 1960.

Whilst China is predicted to recover its former position within the world economy, this time instead of the Americas having a very small percentage of world wealth, as in year 1, now it is African territories that are predicted to remain small on the international financial stage. Eastern European territories are also predicted to have decreasing proportions of world wealth.

(Emphasis mine)

That is why I have little sympathy for those Trump supporters who say they are not racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted but hope that Donald Trump as President can help them get jobs. The simple fact that Trump’s expressions of racism, sexism and other examples of just plain RUDENESS to others did not deter them from voting for him means they have no business claiming to be enlightened. And if they are not enlightened, I do not respect them, period. More to the point, people wanting Donald Trump to get them back jobs they lost are delusional; that can only happen if Trump establishes a form of socialism, which most conservatives seem to be deathly afraid of. In a free market global economy, when labor costs are less in other parts of the world than here, the manufacturing jobs will go there and not remain here. Also, do American coal miners and manufacturers really want to compete with Chinese ones, for example? Then they will have to take a massive pay cut and abandon all safety regulations…..and end up poor and dying due to accidents anyway. Slapping a trade embargo on China carries with that its own national security risks; the Chinese could retaliate any number of ways later.

These issues of ahistoricality and lack of holism also explain the appeal of the claims of anti-vaxxers. People today simply have no idea how horrible epidemics were before vaccines came along. And in the (very few) cases in which defective vaccines DO cause diseases or disorders of some kind, people tend to ignore that public health issues in the distant past were still far worse for societies as a whole and focus on the plight of those few individuals today. Want to bet anti-vaxxism is not very popular in Africa now? Even there, people no longer suffer from smallpox, which was wiped out in the 20th Century, thanks to vaccines.

4 thoughts on “Two Reasons for Public Ignorance

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