Politics and Cognitive Development

It's becoming clear that a large segment of the human species has limited or suspended cognitive development. Around the world, much of this can be attributed to lack of educational resources, There may be brilliant minds out there who simply never learned the meanings of numbers and words.

How do we explain this problem in the United States, where nearly everyone goes to school, yet it seems more than half of the population are struggling with certain aspects of thinking. What are they thinking?

They forgot or lack knowledge of the tragedies which caused the creation of safety and environmental regulations.

If they, their immediate family or social circle are not affected by something directly, they believe it's a conspiracy or a lie, is evil or they simply don't care, despite that they are still affected by it in some way.

They never question or challenge their authority figures or opinion leaders on any claim based on false, misleading or incomplete information, which makes them the best candidates for employment by exploitative narcissistic sociopaths (which you must be in order to not be bothered by capitalism in its current form.)

They are incapable of empathy or compassion. Despite being taught all the information about a different group of people, they are incapable of, or unwilling to imagining what the lives of those people are like.

They are incapable of abstract thinking, unable to extrapolate the cause and effect of things over time or across relational distances.

They are easily manipulated by distorted statistics, misleading or omitted information, or information from two different unrelated issues placed in close proximity, either in time or side-by-side physicall, such as the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the invasion of Iraq.

They are easily distracted by stimuli which appeals to basic needs, and easily conditioned into abject consumerism, leading them into permanent indebtedness.

They are unwilling to make an effort to change their ways, despite losing their jobs to outsourcing or innovation, or they simply cannot because they lack the savings necessary to move out of a bad area or situation.

They are conned into voting against their own interests and blaming others for their own mistakes.

They make up the vast majority of the population. Why? Capitalism. Abject Capitalism.

The result? The current government.

See Fischer's Theory on Cognitive Development. See also Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development.

These people have all the hallmarks of children younger than age 11, yet they are adults.

This is the consequence of Manufacturing Consent, traced back as far as Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays and William Randolph Hearst.

Human Stress and Persuasion

What's ironic is people under the most stress are easily persuaded by deception against the wrong group as the cause of their problems to such a degree that they vote against their own best interests, develop hatred and fear based on minor ideological, physical or lingual differences or geographical distances. The New York Times developed an interactive map showing precisely where most of these people are. It's not a stretch to guess which states and counties belong to which political party.

This stress build-up is engineered by recession, unemployment rates, energy rates, food prices, rent, and control over the mass media. It's not a difficult undertaking when so few have control over so much.

They were banking on enough public stress to start a war with Syria. Well, it didn't work so if House Democrats have enough votes for a discharge petition to get the budget to the floor for a vote, bypassing Speaker Boehner, they could do it, but I suspect by the echoing sound of nails being hammered into a coffin of a certain political party that they might be holding off on that.

They better not wait too long or the fight over the Debt Ceiling will shatter the global market's confidence in the U.S. Dollar, but something is off this time. The stock market is not reacting like it's usual high-strung incontinent self. It's behaving more and more like a single entity, a behemoth waiting to see the whites in the eyes of gullible borrowers.

The Market's reaction to the government shutdown was counter-intuitive to previous similar events according to Bloomberg Business Week: The Market Calm Before the Debt-Ceiling Storm (10/04/2013) The markets may have gained confidence since the previous debt-ceiling extravaganza, or they figured a way to profit from the crisis and are on a hair-trigger.

Either way it might not matter if we are destroyed by the debris field of the comet ISON.