Although these days we use pseudo-psycho-mumbo-jumbo like "Confirming my priors" and "Validating the reader", this old boy was writing about such things in his SciFi novel 76 years ago:
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945
As we saw in yesterday's "Planet of the Grifters" with it's quick look at Turchin's idea that there are too many elites and wannabe elites, there is money to be made from feeding the fantasy of the wannabe. (as the degenerate state of academia shows)
And that probably accounts for some of the crabbiness we see from folks who, compared with our billions and billions of forebearers, back into the mists of time, are among the most privileged and advantaged ever to walk the earth.
They also get grumpy when reminded of that fact....
And "The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility"
