Today I stopped to grab replacement frames for my daughter’s glasses. The lady asked about my daughter’s name (Hermione).
Me: Like the girl from Harry Potter.
Clerk: Oh I’ve never seen those movies, I don’t believe in the witches and warlocks and such.
Me, jokingly: Well it’s all make believe, nobody actually thinks that witches or warlocks are real.
She then informed me that they are indeed real and she’s a member of a missionary group who “casts them out” all the time…
This is a fully grown (looked to be 45-50ish) adult woman, who is allowed to vote and reproduce, who straight up believes that magic, witches and warlocks are real, and not only that, she is a member of a larger organization of people who go out on “missions” to “cast out” these evildoers. And she works in a business where she holds at least some authority over an aspect of peoples’ health and well being.
The crazier thing is, she’s not the first person in this area I’ve met who thinks witches and warlocks are real life people out there casting spells and shit.
And that is why Trump won re-election.
Edit for clarification: Around here when somebody says they “don’t believe” in a thing, specifically in this context, what they mean is they “don’t support” that thing. I’ve also heard people say they “don’t believe” in guns, despite them being very real. What they mean is, they don’t “support” a thing, not that they literally don’t believe it’s real.
You would think that access to the collective knowlege of the internet would fix that… Its apparently made it worse…
Turned out there was more collective stupidity
We all forget that we are really at the very start … the very infancy of our civilization. We spent much of our evolution as hunter/gatherers wandering around the wilderness trying to survive … it’s only been a couple hundred years that we got out of that. Sure many of us became farmers and city people a few thousand years ago but all of them were all uneducated, unaware and highly superstitious people who only understood the world superficially.
It will take a few hundred or a few thousand years of development and hundreds of generations for us to get away from our habits … if we can survive that long.
Your IF statement at the end of your post really is the limiting factor. Im not as optimistic as you are, but its good that some people are.