The Ability to Know What is Important

This is part of the ability to know, that was critical to human success. As soon as we became human, we had the ability to understand our world - even places we had never seen before, and we soon we were living successfully everywhere in that world.

Much of this success, was due to our Language, something no other species has ever had. This gave us the ability to think about our world, and to pass the knowledge we gained, on to other people - especially our children.

We hunted some large animals to extinction - but other than that, had little impact on the world. We had everything we needed, and were content with that, for millions of years. We had our religions also, and they were concerned with the spirits of everything. Our spirits lived in harmony, more or less, with the other spirits.

I will skip over the rest of human history, because I want to concentrate on some recent developments, during the last 500 years, or so. When we became Modern People. And I will fast-forward, even more, to the last 50 years - when some really amazing developments occurred. Namely the appearance of the Hard Right. That happened everywhere, but especially in the US,  with the election of Trump.

This surprised everyone, but it was only the last of a long development that began in the middle of the 19th Century, and was intensified in the Thirties, with the rise of the masses and Fascism.

Most people now can no longer think for themselves, and have lost the ability to think about what is important, and what is not.

They cannot think, because they know, they are not supposed to think. Something else is doing their thinking for them.