It’s people not being educated anymore to tolerate divergence of opinions and, a lot more worryingly imho, not being able, because of that lack of proper education, to listen to nuanced thoughts and ideas and to be able to understand that we can disagree without having to hate on one another.
What's most worrying to me is that people don't even know why they AGREE with the opinions they agree with. For example, most people would agree that bigotry is bad (which it is), but they don't know how to argue about it.
They’ve got the moral instinct, sure, but zero intellectual grounding. And that’s a problem. Because when people don’t understand why something is wrong, they're just one propaganda push away from accepting a new definition of "bigotry" that serves whoever’s in power.
We’re seeing it happen in real time. People repeat opinions like they’re reciting scripture - no thought, no critique, just blind agreement. And now, even asking people to think critically about why bigotry is wrong is seen as suspect. It's an immediate failure of purity testing. You're not supposed to arrive to the conclusion that bigotry is bad by thinking for yourself, you are just supposed to keep repeating the correct slogans. That’s not just lazy, it’s anti-intellectualism, the exact kind of mental rot that populism and fascism thrive on. That's exactly the kind of bullshit that got USA in the state it is right now.
I have literally been called a fascist for telling people to think for themselves.