Well, when I first saw your response, my impulse was to say that it boils down to Education - and it does; but not Public Education, which is subject to every sway in popular opinion.
Though I began attending public school in the late 1950s, when public-school education in the US was still pretty good, I realize that my REAL education took place at home. I was taught morality, Idealism, Golden Rule, a love for READING - by loving parents AT HOME. My family wasn’t particularly church-going ‘religious’, but they made sure that I got a grounding in a church; and that instilled a sense of the spiritual side of life, as well.
This is how kids learn to really THINK - through all of these various influences. And without them - with mothers working outside of the home, mindless television as baby-sitter, and the largely waste-of-time that passes for public education now, the kids just don’t learn to THINK.
And without THINKING, they are susceptible to being hypnotized by every shallow notion that is in the air, as long as it is presented in a ‘snazzy’ way. They are unable to be critical in their assessments of the issues presented to them; they wind up being ‘knee-jerk’ participants in one shallow mind-set or another. And, in some cases, they begin to see the entire world through the one or two issues that they CAN understand and grasp.
It breaks my heart every day, to see how much kids today are missing, all of the beauty they miss, because the ability to perceive and enjoy it is no longer instilled in them through senses of Value and Idealism.
(Sorry for the rant...we were talking about a dead lion...and there I go, again...:-)
-JT
Critical thinking is dead. The herd is everything. It’s easy, and doesn’t require any mental heavy lifting, like being able to have two thoughts at once.