I have definitely written about this before. Many times.
America has a drug problem nobody wants to talk about honestly. Not fentanyl. Not alcohol. Ignorance. Specifically, the cultivated, deliberate, chosen variety. Selective ignorance. And like any addiction, the longer it goes untreated, the more it takes from you, and the more dangerous the addict becomes to everyone around them.
What makes it an addiction rather than a simple deficit is the active, continuous work required to maintain it. Psychologists call it motivated reasoning: the cognitive process by which people do not reason toward truth but toward conclusions they have already decided they want. This is not passive.
People running motivated reasoning are working hard, filtering incoming information, discarding what contradicts the preferred conclusion, amplifying what confirms it. The ignorance in America's current crisis is not a shortage of available information.
We live in the most information-saturated society in human history. This is a shortage of willingness to receive information that costs something. That is a crucial distinction, and it changes everything about how we diagnose what is happening to us.
We did not stumble into this. We chose it, repeatedly, at every turn where knowing something inconvenient would have cost us comfort, privilege, or the warm bath of tribal belonging. We chose it in churches, in school board meetings, in voting booths, and on social media feeds algorithmically tuned to feed us exactly what we already believed. The addiction metastasized in plain sight.
And it is worth understanding why the social cost of knowing is so high. Social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner established decades ago that human identity is inseparable from group membership. We do not just belong to groups. We are our groups.
When the group's shared worldview requires the rejection of expertise, accepting expertise becomes an act of betrayal. You do not just change your mind. You lose your people. In communities where the group is the whole of a person's identity and social world, that cost is existential. Ignorance becomes the price of admission, and people pay it willingly, even gratefully, because what they are buying is belonging.
There is a phenomenological dimension here that goes deeper still. Willful unknowing is not a passive state. It is an active, lived experience requiring continuous maintenance. On some level, the person who chooses not to know is aware of the choice. Reality keeps pressing in, and the relief of not engaging it has to be re-administered, reinforced, re-confirmed by the group. That is the addiction structure exactly. The substance is not a chemical. It is the relief of a world simplified to the point where you and your tribe are right, and everyone with credentials and data and uncomfortable questions is the enemy.
I was in high school in the early 1970s when my teacher (I've previously written about my high school Civics and World Problems teacher, the amazing Mrs. Wotton) walked us through what Mao Zedong had done to China with his Cultural Revolution. We sat there, American teenagers, shaking our heads at how stupid those people must be.
How could an entire society follow a megalomaniac into the deliberate destruction of its own intellectual class? How do you purge universities, persecute doctors, imprison professors, and silence scientists, and have a population that either cheers or says nothing?
We were very smug about that. Very confident it could never happen here.
What we did not understand then, and what the psychology makes clear now, is that Mao's Red Guards were not simply destroying expertise. They were building community through that destruction. The shared rejection of the intellectual class was a bonding ritual.
The public humiliations, the struggle sessions, the denunciations: all of it created solidarity among participants. You proved your belonging by performing your contempt for knowledge. The crowd that cheers when a professor is fired, when a doctor is silenced, when a library is purged, is not just expressing hatred. It is renewing its membership in the tribe.
Here we are.
Donald Trump did not invent American ignorance. He weaponized it. He handed it a flag, a cross, and a grievance, and told it that everything it didn't understand was the enemy. White Christian nationalism became the operating ideology of a federal government. Not a fringe. Not a protest movement. The government.
The psychological engine underneath that movement has a clinical name: Terror Management Theory, developed from Ernest Becker's foundational work and extended by Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon. When people feel their mortality, their significance, or their cosmological worldview under threat, they do not open up. They contract. They cling harder to the group identity that gives them meaning and to the enemies that justify their fear.
White Christian nationalism offers exactly the right package for that psychological state: a cosmology, a tribe, a hierarchy, a villain, and a promise of eternal significance to people who feel they have been made small. Trump did not build that. He found tens of millions of people already running that psychological program and gave them permission to act on it.
Agencies gutted. Scientists fired or sidelined. Educators targeted. Health agencies hollowed out in the middle of a century that has already demonstrated what happens when you let preventable diseases find an opening.
And it is worth knowing that much of this ignorance is not organic. It is manufactured.
Historian Robert Proctor developed the field of agnotology, the formal study of culturally induced ignorance and doubt, after studying how the tobacco industry spent decades deliberately producing uncertainty about the link between smoking and cancer.
They did not need people to believe cigarettes were safe. They only needed people to believe the science was unsettled. The same machinery runs today on climate research, vaccine safety, election integrity, and pandemic response. Engineered doubt is not a side effect of the information age. It is a product, developed, funded, and distributed with precision.
We are watching infectious disease rates climb back toward numbers we were told we'd never see again, because a meaningful portion of the population has decided that the people who study disease are the enemy, and the people who spread misinformation about it are the heroes.
We are watching professors lose positions. Researchers lose funding. Federal employees purged for the content of their emails and their perceived politics. Libraries challenged. Curricula sanitized.
And we haven't even gotten to the imprisonments and murders...yet.
I say yet with full awareness of what I'm saying. Because if you had described the current state of American governance to me in 1973 in that high school classroom, I would have told you it sounded exactly like what we were being warned about.
Except we were being warned about them.
The Soviets.
The Chinese. Cautionary tales on the other side of the world.
The cautionary tale was always us, waiting to happen.
Ignorance is comfortable. Too comfortable. Selective ignorance is ecstatic.
You get to keep your prejudices, discard inconvenient facts, belong to a community of the like-minded, and feel righteous about all of it.
The MaGA movement did not recruit stupid people. It recruited comfortable ones.
It recruited people who found the drug of chosen ignorance, of selective ignorance, more appealing than the cost of knowing things that challenged their worldview.
Fascism does not need jackboots on day one.
It needs an addicted population that has practiced, for decades, the discipline of not knowing what it does not want to know. That population is ready-made for whoever arrives with the right story.
It would seem we learned nothing from what we studied. Or we have simply...purposefully...forgotten it.
Worse, we were too arrogant to think we needed to remember it.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
Purpleism opposes all human irritants. Trump has consumed that space so completely everything now runs through him.
That distortion of daily life is itself a Purpleism issue.
Exhausting.
Malignant Narcissism does that
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
If this work means something to you, you can support it at Ko-fi. Tips are always welcome and go directly toward keeping independent documentary work possible.
