It’s not even about your or my standards. The overall tone of media sets the standard. There’s already a rising tide of anti-intellectualism that seeks to activ

It’s not even about your or my standards. The overall tone of media sets the standard. There’s already a rising tide of anti-intellectualism that seeks to actively disparage intellectual thought as “uppity” as described in a comment above. This is not healthy for society. If you wonder how it was that in history, waves of advancement in knowledge seem to be followed by periods where things seem to go backwards, I find it easy to imagine that popular anti-intellectual sentiment would have looked very similar. Distrust of “elites” and disparagement of the philosophies of those “elites”, throwing out the baby with the bath water. EDITED to add that what attaches itself to such sentiment (or stokes it), are cynical political actors happy to gain power irrespective of the cost to society.