A Western welfare society is a wonderful place to live, complete with social guarantees and free speech. Every person is valued and the country exists to serve the person, not the other way around. Every condition for intellectual and cultural blossoming has been created, which should soon give us seven billion scholars. However, the reality is less rosy.

Allow me to point to a few shortcomings and try to explain why our current society promotes the degeneration of thinking.

The effect of technology on thinking

Western society is deeply saturated with technology, and in an environment where Google seemingly has all the answers, it often feels like there's little reason to think for oneself when a mouse click or a tap on the screen can provide solutions to any question.

This way of thinking is further reinforced by the habit of expecting everything immediately, which diminishes the value we place on things. For instance, the use of ChatGPT has become commonplace, offering quick answers and reducing the need for in-depth research.

How often do we have face-to-face conversations that don't involve smartphones? Although we believe we can multitask effectively, this isn't true in reality. Our brains aren't capable of focusing on multiple things simultaneously. For example, during work meetings where people are also checking emails, productivity and the quality of communication suffer. Do we really know how our closest friends are doing? Is what we see in an Instagram story a true reflection of what a person is feeling or doing, or is it more about how they want to be perceived on social media?

Living in the information age presents us with challenges that didn't exist in the 20th century: information overload, software glitches and a multitude of opinions. While it's easy to find information through search engines, distinguishing legitimate information from noise is left to the user. This is compounded by Google's ability to understand users' desires better than they might themselves. Google can find information that supports an argument one wants to validate. For instance, someone searching for information about vaccines might end up on anti-vaccine websites if their previous searches have been biased.

A third element contributing to a lack of critical thinking is the ability of anyone to post whatever they wish on the internet. In a life permeated by social media, one can forget to truly live, and the pursuit of digital dopamine becomes a daily goal. Intriguing headlines are consumed, conclusions about entire topics are drawn from them and opinions are formed accordingly.

Learned helplessness and the Dunning-Kruger effect

Western welfare societies create ideal opportunities for personal and intellectual development, but this can also lead to a stagnation in thinking for some people. For example, while free higher education and widespread access to the internet provide tremendous resources, they don't always encourage deep exploration of topics. The Dunning-Kruger effect explains why individuals with little knowledge in a particular field might believe they have a comprehensive understanding, only to discover their knowledge is superficial when they delve deeper.

No one wants to appear foolish, so there's a tendency to believe that having heard a little about a topic makes one an expert, whether the subject is economics, international relations or any other complex field. For instance, throughout 2023, many confident opinions emerged regarding the causes and solutions to the economic crisis, yet there was a noticeable lack of in-depth and thorough analyses.

Summary and conclusions

Western welfare societies provide opportunities for growth, but they also carry the risk of intellectual stagnation. From the perspective of thinking, technology is a double-edged sword – it offers great opportunities for development, but it also makes it easy to fall into a comfort zone. We should use the advantages of a welfare society to foster a more intellectually vibrant community, rather than producing a planet full of passive individuals.

Everything starts with personal commitment and the development of critical thinking, setting aside prejudices and striving to understand the world from multiple perspectives.

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