Something I’ve realized only recently how surface level most people’s gloss of events and motivations for those events are.

I knew people were ignorant. What I didn’t realize is just how willfully ignorant they are. It’s not that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t even want to know.

At another site, I posted a comment about how Google’s HTTPS push had nothing to do with the best interests of the consumer and everything to do with Google’s desire to shape and to control the market — including in advertising.

At that site, you’d think I’d suggested that it was ok to decapitate kittens with lawn mowers. Not only was I some sort of deranged conspiracy theorist, of course the HTTPS push/putsch was all being done because fluffy, cuddly little Google cares about you and just wants to make you safer.

It’s not just that specific issue that concerns me — though that one is pretty blatant — but the general phenomenon. Not only are most “intelligent” people content to understand nearly nothing except received wisdom, they are also happy to lampoon anyone who wishes to comprehend anything below that perfunctory surface-level gloss.

I’ve realized it for a long time, but smart people as societally-defined usually aren’t all that smart.

Some of them — many of them, perhaps most of them — are in fact mulishly moronic, and not only don’t mind, they revel in it.

This is something I haven’t fully consolidated in my own mind, but this is sort of antipodal to conspiracy theorists — it’s the obstinate denial of the complexity of the world or that there is anything operating under the surface at all.

I haven’t made sense of it yet. But unlike those people, at least I realize there is something to make sense of.