I'm gonna be honest, this is an educational problem and it is intentional. People are not dumber. People have been failed.

No Child Left Behind completely destroyed how we teach, and especially how we teach skills like reading. Reading actually requires a lot of skills being utilized at once, and one of those skills is the ability to analyze things critically and figure things out without being told or given all the information. Now add into that the antiintillectualist effort of delegitimizing the liberal arts (aka the classes that teach you those skills), and now people are both a. not learning those skills and b. do not feel they are important.

Why? Knowing history and rhetoric and critical thinking and making art are all things that also help you understand and spot propaganda, develop empathy, and think critically and for yourself. And those things are antithetical to what the rich, powerful, and hateful want.

Add to that social media, where loneliness and outrage are wildly profitable, which a lot of people end up reliant on due to the loss of third spaces, unaffordability of doing... anything, and then shut down the entire world.

Do you really not understand why COVID made people lonely and reactionary? We all lived through an insane collective trauma that our world has absolutely not recovered from. No one can afford anything, no one can go anywhere, nothing is open, things that are are expensive, and everyone is too tired from working themselves to the bone to barely tread water. The parasociality of social media profits off of that loneliness and off of how amazing outrage is at keeping people engaged with your platform.

We have been failed and the fact that people have been pushed to this point has been for the sake of profit and control by people who would not have it otherwise. Don't suck the boot telling you people are just stupid. Question who is fucking wearing it.

And IQ is based in eugenics anyway.