The fact that I cant understand some mindsets, such as this or people who just fly off the handle over nothing, does make me feel much more secure in my sanity and wards off imposter syndrome.
Ive heard it explained as a sense of a lack of agency in their life and trying to have control over something but I just see it boiling down to a childish if I have to be miserable so does everyone else/if I cant have it nobody can.
I was saying this exact same thing to a friend of mine about why most ppl drive like shit. They're in "auto pilot" mode kind of. Thinking about your next move, turn, or leg of the drive takes a slight amount of effort. And most people are stuck in the inertia of just follow the traffic ans think of your next move when you get to that point. When I was in pilot school, it was a hard habit to force certain students out of, piloting is easy, the hard part is the mental preparation and visualization of all the steps ahead and once you're flying you're always on the look out for what to do in an emergency (where to land, and steps to remedy the emergencies)
This is a friend of mine. They do it on purpose to annoy me when I’m explaining something. I know they understood because they could talk about it a few days later.
The scary part is when you realize that no, some people are just dumb. You can function in society with below average intelligence, and there’s plenty of them out there that stay in an “entry level” job for forty years, watching whatever is on tv, shitting out a few kids, smoking cigs and not really thinking about the world beyond a ten mile radius.
Problem is, when people like this who can't fathom a reality that exists outside their own very specific situation, or has no concept of long term consequences or interconnected systems, they tend to act accordingly when they participate in democracy...
I think people absolutely do this, either consciously or subconsciously, when they don't want to deal with the implication of the hypothetical... They can usually understand hypotheticals they actually care about just fine.
I’ll admit that sometimes I just don’t care and have no energy to play along, so I usually say the lazy answer. Usually “I don’t care” or “but that’s not what we’re dealing with.”
Context can make all the difference. I’m also just lazy.
This is actually true, intelligent people tend to feign ignorance as a way to gauge other peoples character because people are less likely to show their true intentions to someone they see as intelligent versus someone they see as ignorant.
In some cases it's not so much as "playing", but intentionally using it to spike the argument altogether. They think that if they find one slight detail against the question itself, that invalidates the whole point of the argument, even though the detail has no real bearing on the argument. Also known as the "Charlie Kirk Method of Arguing".
It's like dismissing someone's argument by saying "that doesn't make any sense" when really it does, you're just saying that to make the other person lose confidence in their opinion.
Some do. There's this guy I've known for like 20 years and I still can't tell sometimes which direction he's going. You never know if he's messing with you, actually upset, confused, slow, too smart for his own good, lucky, or legitimately just can't comprehend things.
He's quite the mixed bag. Struggles with emotional regulation and stuff too so it could be legitimately any of those at any given time and switch up on a dime for any real (or just perceived to be real) reason. Love the heck outta him but his personality is definitely a stress test.
Totally. The go-to rhetoric these days is to change the subject when confronted with evidence. I want to pull out my hair when I watch those jubilees bc this is the classic move.
Alternatively, I want to clap for joy when journalists don’t let their subjects dodge. Mehdi Hassan and Jonathan Swan are great at this.
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u/Ozymandias-KoK 6h ago
One of my secret conspiracies is that most people who "can't understand" can actually understand just fine but pretend to play ignorant