Why are people like this and how can we stop them ?

I asked her if she had voted in the EU elections. She said there were no EU elections. I took out my phone and showed her there had been EU elections. She said that we weren’t allowed to vote in them. I asked her what evidence she had for that and what she thought an MEP was. She didn’t know. I asked her as politely as I could if she knew what the Schengen area was – she didn’t care – she was voting out.

On another occasion a woman in her sixties told me: “I don’t want us to join the EU.” When I explained that we already were in the EU she refused to believe me and as I impatiently set about proving otherwise – I realized that our cause was fucked. It was probably fucked anyway.

If the UK is to climb out of this insufferable mire, we need to stop treating the British public like nine year olds. Square number one on that journey is to tell them the truth. Namely, that most of them on both sides of the referendum no more understood the complexities of it than they understand Heraclitus in the original Greek.

Here's the problem. There are two competing factors :
- In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.
- In the age of information overload, ignorance is inevitable.
The second one is at least somewhat valid. Certain information - especially complex political information - is not at all easy to obtain when you have to wade through hyperpartisan sources and outright fake news in order to find it. And yet when it comes to the very basics, the first statement is much more applicable. It is trivial to find out who your MP is or what voting system is in place. The only way to remain ignorant of the absolute basics is indeed through choice, or stupendous levels of indoctrination.

Which raises two not entirely separate questions : 1) Why do people do this ? 2) What do we do about it ?

The first one is tricky. It's tempting to agree with the sentiment that if we empower people and give them more responsibility to make their own choices, then they will feel more motivated and more likely to behave responsibly; if we treat them like decent people then they should behave like decent people. And yet the sheer willful ignorance expressed here implies that there must be more to it than that : there is absolutely nothing stopping them from looking up basic information they could find in 30 seconds or less that requires zero intelligence or effort, nothing to stop them fact-checking claims and (seemingly) plenty of sources telling them not to take things at face value. So it seems that treating them as responsible doesn't mean they'll behave appropriately. Which implies the reverse of the sentiment is true - that they're being treated like idiots because they keep behaving like idiots in the first place. Only a truly, innately, irredeemably stupid person could remain ignorant in the face of so many easily available sources of basic information.

(Much, much more on the interplay between knowledge and actions and the spread of information here : https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/izrupauy1it)

The second question is probably easier to answer. In the long term, cutting the available sources of misinformation will help. As far as the level of ignorance in the anecdotal examples above goes, it's hard not to share Plato's opinion that the only way to deal with such people is through deliberate manipulation rather than getting them to become better at critical thinking, a task that appears to be hopeless. So reduction of misinformation must be accompanied by emotional, persuasive rhetoric rather than trying to make them more coolly analytical. In the short term, one has to wonder why in the world such people are allowed to vote. As I've said before, some sort of fact-based quiz would probably do a lot more good than harm.

The major caveat to all this is that the extent of such profound ignorance is hard to judge. I would very much like to believe that these people are a tiny minority, but experience indicates otherwise.

https://thepinprick.com/2019/01/21/the-majority-of-british-people-dont-know-who-their-mp-is-so-how-can-they-be-expected-to-understand-brexit/