LizzieMaine
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The dumber people are, the more crap they'll buy. Simple as that. Thinking is bad for business.
After watching much current television, "It Pays to be Ignorant" seems to be the soul of intellectual wit and grace.
The days when The Saturday Review of Literature was known to every educated American have sadly long since passed. Imagine a modern Henry Scheerman hiring a Henry Seidel Canby to assemble an editorial board including Dorothy Fisher, William Allen White, Christopher Morley and Heywood Broun!
It seems inconceivable.
I work with teenagers every day, kids who have grown up in modern schools. They aren't *dumb.* Not at all. They read a lot, everything from Proust to "Twilight," they have decent vocabularies, they can carry on a conversation without too many "like yah, y'knows" in it. They're smart kids, they would have been smart in 1937, and they're smart today. They do have a pretty shallow understanding of 20th Century history, but being around me is getting them squared away in that area.
But they don't seem to *think* the way I do, and I have to be very clear and very specific in what I want them to do -- they don't seem to have the talent for improvisation that I had at their age, the ability to work out an alternative way of doing something if the original idea doesn't work out. If something unexpected happens, they call for me to come over and fix it, rather than improvising a solution on the spot as I would have done.
I think the Internet has a lot to do with this. The Internet gives you information and answers, but in a lot of ways it does your thinking for you. Got a question or a problem? Go to Google and get an answer, bang bang bang. No need to suss it out for yourself, no need to analyze the situation and consider the various issues and figure out how to resolve it. The Internet makes life too easy -- and for a growing kid, that's a very dangerous thing. We learn from challenges, not having solutions dished up to us in easy bite-sized morsels.
It isn't about sinister conspiracies or evil educational philosophies or any of the rest of that. It's about an entire society that can't be bothered to sit down for half an hour some evening and just read an interesting essay with no other purpose but to consider an interesting idea.
Faith in a "Sinister Conspiracy" offers the believer absolution for his or her own cupidity or intellectual sloth, does it not?
Yes it most certainly does. Reminds me of those poor doomsday preppers storing all that food and firearms in bunkers fearing social collapse when either the government or their neighbors will come for them.Faith in a "Sinister Conspiracy" offers the believer absolution for his or her own cupidity or intellectual sloth, does it not?
Reminds me of the age old truth, "The love of money is the root of all evil."What you say is 100 percent accurate. One current trend even from the media, they can write or say anything and have the general public believing the story even if it is a total fabrication. I can see a link or connection if you will, from sales of items to sales of a story. Manipulation for profit, ease of operation, greed.
Danged double post,..sorry about that.What you say is 100 percent accurate. One current trend even from the media, they can write or say anything and have the general public believing the story even if it is a total fabrication. I can see a link or connection if you will, from sales of items to sales of a story. Manipulation for profit, ease of operation, greed.
You know, the word "troglodytic" has frequently come to mind of late.
Oddly enough, my spell-check flags "troglodytic" and "troglodytical" as mis-spelled, though the noun "troglodyte" flag it does not.
But if the guy has learned to put his message over subtly and indirectly - to make it sound like anything but "noise" - he can hold people's attention for much longer. Maybe even longer than people are conscious of. Intellectual sloth and dishonesty, cautiously encouraged, cleverly couched and cynically promulgated, can take deep root.What gives me hope is that most people come to recognize such intellectual sloth and dishonesty. They eventually stop paying any attention to that guy who's making all that noise.
But if the guy has learned to put his message over subtly and indirectly - to make it sound like anything but "noise" - he can hold people's attention for much longer. Maybe even longer than people are conscious of. Intellectual sloth and dishonesty, cautiously encouraged, cleverly couched and cynically promulgated, can take deep root.
You couldn't do such a program today. "Discussion" is a matter of all or nothing, kill or be killed, and moderation is seen as an attempt to "stifle freedom." (We even hear that directed to we, the moderators, here at the Lounge.) A sad commentary on our times.