At the end of 2023, I was talking with a man who has a PhD in one of the hard sciences and happened to mention deaths from the experimental Covid injections. In surprise he responded, “Wait, people died from the vaccines?” I was astonished that this person was still unaware of the fact of Covid injection fatalities.
However, his case is not unique. Along with an inability to do critical thinking, many have exhibited conspicuous ignorance of the facts about Covid, despite the great amount of information readily available. Furthermore, as a general rule, many people nowadays simply do not know enough about various fields of knowledge necessary to form intelligent opinions and make sensible decisions.
When I returned to the US after several years in Japan during the 1980s, I was taken aback to discover how many believed that they already knew a lot about Japan, when they obviously did not. At the time, Japan’s booming economy had garnered a lot of worldwide and journalistic attention. For example, I once saw a well-known American TV reporter interviewing a Japanese Zen priest, who explained that Japan’s economic success was due to Zen’s reverence for the material world. The reporter then endorsed that idea.
That explanation was clearly nonsense. Most in Japan are not Zen Buddhists, since a wide variety of Buddhist groups exist here. It is next to impossible to generalize about their beliefs. Moreover, much of Japan’s business success has been due to implementing lessons learned from abroad. For example, Japanese corporate leaders learned to prioritize quality control from the American W. Edwards Deming. From that time I began to realize the unreliability of the mainstream news media as a source of knowledge.
Ignorance about other countries is certainly not rare, even when those places happen to be much in the news. For example, while teaching a course about the Arab-Israeli conflict to junior college students in Osaka in the 1990s, I was shocked to discover how little background knowledge they actually had.
Hellbound and Down 