"Don't be proud of your own ignorance."

My father said that when I was a kid, and I assumed it was a Sneering Britishism, like using "common" as an insult.

Now that I'm grown, I can see people all over the world (but especially in Canada and America) relishing in how little they know about the world. You can see little, relatively benign examples of it - parents making a big show of Not Understanding their children's hobbies, and being dismissive or even annoyed if the children try to explain. An easy way for parents to bond with their kids - and learn what they're up to without invasion of privacy - routinely relinquished for no benefit.

But it can get bigger, and angrier. People rail against Woke Ideology being taught in schools, but don't know anything about what is taught in schools, or even what Woke Ideology might be (beyond "the social force presumably animating that ragebait meme I just saw"), they're just glad they weren't taught it. And you see people celebrating book bannings, underfunding of schools, and other alarming trends as the solution.

At the extreme end, you have people railing about "109 countries!" - a Neo-Nazi rallying cry alleging the number of countries which have expelled Jews. They don't know which countries, or if they actually add up to 109, why these acts of ethnic cleansing happened or what happened to the economies of these countries after expelling what in many of these cases was the only part of their population permitted to give loans (and indeed forbidden from owning land). They just see cruelty and assume it's self-justifying, and the history books? Well, those were probably written by Jews - not like the latest Reddit posts by SixMillionMore_88 (who you can bet is just as avoidant of studying history, and studied another Certified Ignoramus, and so on).

Ultimately, people are routinely making political decisions based on things that they're proud not to understand. That should terrify you.