Do Not Expect an Epiphany

In response to the meme at left, a reader notes:

Republican candidates in Texas: “I’m going to fix the mess the Democrats made” – who is more pathetic, those GOP conmen or the morons who keep voting them in?

This is an astute observation.  There is always a market where supply and demand meet.  It doesn’t matter if that market is a social evil like heroin (there are heroin dealers because there are heroin addicts), or a good one (there are excellent colleges because some parents are willing to pay a great deal to have their kids well educated).

As America descends ever further into ignorance, do not expect voters to have the epiphany to the effect that they’ve been lied to.

There is also a psychological effect at play here. As Carl Sagan said:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”