The future environment may well start to favour critical thinkers.
I wish I could be that positive. The problem is that science and technology, including evidence-based medicine, have been and continue to be so singularly successful that they can carry along enormous amounts of deadwood. In western societies, for example, most children with serious afflictions who do not respond to woo-woo medicine (actually, their own bodies’ healing abilities) inevitably end up in a modern hospital’s emergency ward when their situation becomes critical. There, they are in most cases saved, only to be subjected to more woo-woo later on. That is, the parents won’t learn, so how can one expect that the children will? In tribal societies, no one much cares if a child dies in the service of some ancestral ritual.
One can reasonably ask how it is that educated people – and by that I mean university graduates in applied sciences – can buy into Feng Shui and assorted other forms of lucky-charm nonsense. The answer is that they can and do because, firstly, it satisfies, at least temporarily, their craving for the mysterious and mystical, and secondly, it makes no essential difference to their ability to survive. That is why superstitions continue to be rife even in the most sophisticated societies. The superstitions are just of a different order of merit, that’s all.
I think that general stupidity will persist more or less at the current relative level simply because there’s enough leeway in the system to allow it.
'Luthon64