//"presentism" is a belief that human beings from the past are vastly different at a fundamental level than they are today. with modern technology developing and advancing at such a rapid pace, it is very easy to fall into this line of thinking. we think that because our everyday lives differ so greatly from even our most recent ancestors, that we are different people all together, but we could easily come to the conclusion that this isn't so. people from the year 300, 1200, 1940, and now, have the same exact brains, bodies, and d.n.a. that we do today.
i could be wrong, but my intuition tells that it is a common belief that people from the past were not as smart as modern people. but i think it's the other way around. i would bet money that all of the technology that allows us to live a somewhat luxurious life, actually hinders our critical thinking skills. we don't need to work at memorizing something because you could always just take out your phone and google it again when you need the information. you don't need to memorize your grandmothers gardening tips, you'll just look up a youtube video when the time comes. you don't need to learn how to cook because you could live off of what is sold at the grocery store and throw it in the microwave, or just get fast food everyday. fixing things you own is no longer necessary, most things are cheap enough and purposely engineered to be nearly impossible for an untrained person to fix themselves, so you just end up purchasing a new product. you get the point. people don't have to do too much thinking anymore if they don't feel like it. i believe that this is the direct reason that common sense is not so common anymore. we are basically cavemen who have been dropped into the throws of nearly unlimited capability, most of us have no idea what to do with it or how to handle it.
it's a common thought experiment to wonder how a victorian era child might react if someone had shown him television or some other modern marvel. but that's precisely what we are experiencing ourselves. we are not different than them. we think that because we've lived our lives with fancy iphones, playstations, and modern medicine that we have somehow transcended the human condition and achieved a sort of God-like status on earth, and this is true to an extent. we no longer deal with nature the same way our ancestors did. we outsmarted the food-chain, viruses, most ailments, we've figured out how to build skyscrapers and dams and cruise ships, but are we as people any different because of it? i don't think so. we have all this 'stuff,' all this convenience, but are people happier? or are they throwing themselves off rooftops and injecting opioids into their blood stream at record numbers? why are half of women and a third of men on depression medication? and does it even work or does it make things worse?
look at the amish, at around the age of 16, it is a rite of passage for them to leave the tribe and explore life outside of their community without restriction. they do this to see if they want to commit to the amish lifestyle or leave it. but guess how many leave it - zero. they all go back. now, you could say that people just like what they're used to, and yes that is true but i don't think this is what's at play here. i would go out on a limb and say that when they leave their community that they are shocked at what they find. they go from living a beautiful life in the fields to an american city where they witness pure, concentrated hedonistic degeneracy, homeless people covered in their own piss, fags covered in each other's piss, the whole city smells like piss, you'd get trench foot if you took your shoes off and placed your bare foot on the ground, across the street there's people screaming at each other, and right in front of him is a man screaming at himself. this is the true "victorian era child watching television" scenario. one moment they're existing the way God intended for us, the next moment they are questioning if there ever was a God. i would go home while i still could as well.
i mean even right now, im sitting at a train station, waiting for my train, and some crackhead fuck is sitting about 20 feet away, watching some retarded sportsball game on his phone at full volume. if we still lived in proper times i would be allowed to jam a spear through this guy's chest and everyone in here would applaud me for my deed.
anyway, my point is that yes, we are technically different now, but it's only due to circumstance, not because our brains have improved or our dna has changed. if you took a newborn from ancient rome, brought him into a time machine with you, and teleported the both of you to present day, that child would grow to be just like one of us, with all of our strengths, nuance, and flaws.
something that i've always found very comical is the common misconceptions over how exactly the so called atrocities committed by germany in world war 2 came to be. this was only 80 years ago. and if you believe the mainstream narrative of world war 2, that would mean your theory is that all the germans went batshit insane out of nowhere, started exterminating a random group of people because they just decided one day that they didn't like them, they lost the war, and after that all of germany went back to normal. it sounds ridiculous because it is. the germans are, and always have been very smart, rational people. they were this way 2000 years ago, in 1940, and they still are now. this is another problem causing modern lack of critical thinking - the amount of propaganda that is pumped down our throats from the time we are children until the moment we die. you can't even watch a youtube video about a sensitive topic anymore because youtube will take it down, and if they don't, they'll make sure to plaster the kike-approved wikipedia link under the video so that you know what to think.
so, not only does the internet remove a person's need to memorize something, or to think for themselves, but it also has has the capability to affirm someone's incorrect ways of thinking. before the internet, for the sake of argument, let's just say a young man decides that he was born in the wrong body, and that he's really a woman. the father would first try to reason with him, if that didn't work, he would beat the shit out of him until he changes his way of thinking, then that young man would go on to live a normal life. post internet, that same young man would log on, find 6,000,000 people who are fucked up and retarded just like him, he would join their groupchats and forums, he would converse with these people, adopt their talking points, and further solidify his delusion in his head. now he's fucked up for life. God forbid the father says anything about it, he'll end up on tv and then in prison for trying to correct his child. even if the child did not have this thought originally, maybe he was normal to begin with, maybe he just had the misfortune of going on reddit at an age where he is too malleable to foreign ideas, and learns about all of this poisonous ideology. the internet has the power to affirm someones delusions and it also has the power to poison someone with a delusion that they didn't have prior, and i think we see this everywhere we look today in all sorts of ways. it's a real problem. do i have a solution? i would say the internet is not a place for young people. i think anyone who would argue against this is completely stupid and naive. we need to understand that the unfettered and unaimed pursuit of knowledge is not always a healthy thing. you can stare into the void for too long, and what looks back at you may end up changing you for the rest of your life. children should not be able to wield this mass amount of power unsupervised, to say otherwise would be a gross misunderstanding of just how powerful words can be, it can be worse than poison, the pen is mightier than the sword.
i'll end with this, for the people who disagree, and still think people from the past were any different than us, look at the romans and the greeks. the things they built thousands of years ago are really something to marvel at. arches, aqueducts, concrete, bound books, the calendar, and land surveying. yes, today we have smartphones, but could you make a smartphone? these things only exist due to collaboration, essentially putting the greatest minds in the world all together to create something that would otherwise be totally impossible, something that only God himself would have the power to create. it took thousands of years of the smartest of us testing things out and recording the results to get to where we are. we should appreciate it more, and understand that we are no smarter than those that came before us, but we are in fact much less capable. but go ahead, fire up the xbox, play some fortnite while scarfing down petroleum based snacks while you imagine how much better you are than the ancestors that made your life possible.