Explaining the intractable stupidity of the masses

There is a meaning of stupid that refers to the inability to take-in and understand what is happening; and that is the way in which the masses are stupid in the modern Western world. Intractably stupid. Their inability to learn from repeated experience is apparently infinite. 

The correct explanation for intractable stupidity is not what is usually put forward: the relevant stupidity has almost nothing to do with propaganda and censorship of information. 

People can have access to sufficient relevant facts, and true-enough theories to explain them - but remain utterly stupid; because they cannot generalize from one situation to another, from one day to the next. 

Anybody who needs every specific situation, every time something happens, re-explaining - is stupid; or, at any rate, stupid in the meaning I'm using here.  

People, ordinary people, The Masses - even servants, serfs and slaves - were not stupid in the past like they are stupid now; despite that they were uneducated, illiterate, and had very little information or explanation. 

(Indeed, their ignorance was an indomitable last line of defence.) 

One difference is that they (in the past) were able and willing to think for themselves - and no matter how ignorant and uneducated they were, this set a limit to how much and how often they could be deceived. There was a very basic, survival-orientated "peasant cunning" or common sense that stood in the path of the masses accepting anything and everything, when it impinged directly upon their lives and immediate surroundings. 

And in the past (almost-) everybody was religious; which meant they had a larger, more coherent and more extended understanding of reality than the modern masses. The meaning of life in the past extended beyond emotions to the divine; whereas for Modern Man feelings are the bottom-line of what we acknowledge to be reality. 

(Including "facts" - because it is our feelings about a fact that actually decide whether or not a fact is real.) 

As so often, mass stupidity cannot be ameliorated by double-negative methods. 

In other words; because error is infinitely expansible, we cannot solve the problem of error by correcting an ever-increasing multiplicity of errors. 

Falsifying errors (negating negations) is a mug's game - although it provides permanent employment for pundits. 

The answer is, and must be; simple, positive, coherent. 

If each among the masses had a positive and coherent idea of what his life was about, where his life was aimed-at: if he knew what he positively desired in a permanent, eternal sense - then all possible deceptions would (in principle) sooner or later be detectable in terms of their interference with this life goal.

Learning would be possible, because someone who knows where he wants to go and how, can recognize (without needing to be told) who and when others are trying to push him off-course. 

In sum; the modern masses are intractably stupid because they are suffering the mental sickness that is mainstream ideology - those ruling assumptions that include atheism/ materialism/ leftism. 

The good news is that this mental sickness is self-chosen - in the sense of being passively consented-to and then actively defended against refutation. 

And that is also the bad news.