This actually is a learned behavior. Being a fool, everything they say gets corrected. So from their point of view, correcting people and being insufferable is what someone who is smarter does.
It's not their fault they are trying to apply this principle in an upward direction. They're just at the bottom of the barrel.
The smartest people realize the things they don’t know. Dumber folks think they’re experts in everything.
Practical example: Albert Einstein was asked to be the first President of Israel. He refused, because he knew nothing about politics. (I’m unsure if he understood President of Israel is a largely ceremonial position and the real power rests with the Prime Minister.)
This implies they could learn if they wanted to but they refuse. They don’t think they need to learn. They are that dumb. Dunning–Kruger effect could be argued, but I don’t think they are even that smart.
It's not new.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" - Isaac Asimov, 1980
and also
"“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
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u/Ok-Significance-7016 1d ago
I call what Lauren Boebert exhibits “confident stupidity”. She’s stupid and she’s confident showing it. Same for MTG.