US Authoritarianism

do you really think a single one of them would read 2 sentences on stoicism

No, I don't. I expect to share some great writing about their willfull ignorance to others who aren't.

Like how forums work?

there is no amount of rational browbeating that will even

Didn't bother to read the article yourself either, eh? Honestly, it's worth the couple of minutes it takes.

See, I think this is the mistake you are making:

See, this is the mistake I think you're making. You're not trying to have a conversation. If you want to assume people you're writing to know nothing and understand nothing, who you don't need to listen to, consider vlogging, maybe?

The quality of conversations about the reasons of willfull ignorance is much higher in that article than in your reply. Theres fascinating ideas. Quotes from literally the span of a couple of thousand years. So clearly it's not a simple thing, and we have been aware of it, so why does it persist?

Belangia helpfully adds: “A-gnoia means literally ‘not-knowing’; a-mathia means literally ‘not-learning.’ In addition to the type of amathia that is an inability to learn, there is another form that is an unwillingness to learn. … Robert Musii in an essay called On Stupidity, distinguished between two forms of stupidity, one he called ‘an honorable kind’ due to a lack of natural ability and another, much more sinister kind, that he called ‘intelligent stupidity.'”

Belangia also quotes Glenn Hughes, from an essay entitled “Voegelin’s Use of Musil’s Concept of Intelligent Stupidity in Hitler and the Germans,” providing a further elucidation of the concept of amathia (italics in the original):

“The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”

Reading it fully is better, because the author of that article quotes other authors who quote essays and to keep that straight, it's easier just to read it from the link.