"I guess this is what you get when you build a society on a basis of Calvinist Puritan cruelty..."
I think that also to blame is the shockingly substandard education people receive in many parts of the US. (There's a useful analysis recently published at http://www.springerlink.com/content/9u0610162rn51432/fulltext.html .) Great tracts of the US population have never learnt the art of logical thinking; hence stuff that is instantly recognizable as absolute bollocks by (for example) most of the folks who read this LJ, simply on the grounds that it clashes with established reality and/or rationality, can be accepted without question by people who have no tools available to evaluate it.
Hence (outside the political field) all the widely believed rubbish in the US about NASA faking the moon landings, the gubmint using unknown supertechnology to bring down the Twin Towers, the Face on Mars, creationism and geocentrism, Xtian fundamentalism . . . the list is pretty well endless. Of course, other nations suffer these cancers as well; but it seems nowhere (at least among the developed nations) as widespread as in the US, and not all together.
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"I guess this is what you get when you build a society on a basis of Calvinist Puritan cruelty..."
I think that also to blame is the shockingly substandard education people receive in many parts of the US. (There's a useful analysis recently published at http://www.springerlink.com/content/9u0610162rn51432/fulltext.html .) Great tracts of the US population have never learnt the art of logical thinking; hence stuff that is instantly recognizable as absolute bollocks by (for example) most of the folks who read this LJ, simply on the grounds that it clashes with established reality and/or rationality, can be accepted without question by people who have no tools available to evaluate it.
Hence (outside the political field) all the widely believed rubbish in the US about NASA faking the moon landings, the gubmint using unknown supertechnology to bring down the Twin Towers, the Face on Mars, creationism and geocentrism, Xtian fundamentalism . . . the list is pretty well endless. Of course, other nations suffer these cancers as well; but it seems nowhere (at least among the developed nations) as widespread as in the US, and not all together.