Good read. I especially concur with how society has become so gullible, we allow certain elements / factions to seize and control the narrative.
Just my POV, but it seems in the past 40 years people in general have become less and less able to think and decide for themselves. It just may end up being our undoing.
I think there has always been some of that. Maybe I just caught on early.
There was a time when academia jealously guarded its ranks, when advancement to positions of prestige were based on accomplishment. That transition came largely in the sixties, when the motivation for a college education shifted from sincerely desiring that greater level of learning to wanting to escape the clutches of the Draft.
With that additional influx, often of children from moneyed families came an influx of money into the University system, and with that money came students who may have been a mite less suited to the rigors of scientific or other curricula. The Departments which really blossomed in that era were not pre-med or physics, but sociology and psychology, largely theory, and where a case could be made for virtually any viewpoint (as the fields were growing by leaps and bounds) those majors also provided the means for students more interested in partying and avoiding service to get good enough grades to maintain their deferments.
Money flowed into the university system, and with the growing fields and departments, came the 'need' for jobs for those eventual graduates, so it wasn't long before the Studies were generated to tell us all how much we needed those particular professions to tell us all how to live, (funded by the public coffers, naturally), to create a job market for the swarms of students who were actually graduating and not busy jumping majors to stay in school and retain those draft deferments.
This happened in a particularly socially vulnerable era where fewer than 10% of Americans had a college degree, and that level of learning was generally respected by many who did not. When the 'experts' were few, and considered to be highly respected, people tended to believe, especially since professional reputations were hanging in the balance.
But some of us, even then questioned people like the guys who said "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out" and then took their turned on dropped out self to the airport and flew to the next town to preach their folly again.
(Where were drugged, dropped out people getting all the money to fly around the country, anyway?)
Even then, people didn't question experts, and now we live in an age where nearly a third of the population has a degree, and while you would expect them to be well enough educated to question much of what they see and hear, the process of education has become one of indoctrination, of suppressing to the point of failing those who question, and lauding those who parrot what they have been told to believe.
Unfortunately, that has carried over into virtually every facet of life, and the fashion experts are busy lauding the emperor's new clothes, while we can all see the apparent lack of wardrobe.
Kids, though, see what is and what isn't. If grandma is fat, they'll say so. If that show dog smells bad and poops on the floor, they'll mention it. They don't care how many ribbons or what the stud fees are.
So, we have to get them started asking questions (natural enough for the young) before they get shut down, and then step in to defend them for doing so (because those who demand blind compliance will punish them for it.)
And we need to ask a lot more questions ourselves, to expose this nonsense.
