A Wonderfully Shocking Display of Ignorance
Well, I read this. I was hoping for some entertainment but it didn’t happen. Rather this was interesting in that it illustrated important causes for the failure of America. And I am not talking about failure of the educational system, in fact it is still quite good and produces the best university level education on the planet. As for those who don’t make it through the baccalaureate, not so much. But still it is one of the better public educational systems on the planet though subject to much abuse and incompetent management. But something is very wrong. And that something is at a fundamental level of our survivin national culture.
Fox Kerry made an effort to present this with respect to the people involved in the whole flat earth embarrassment as there must be something there. As a journalistic endeavor that is fine. What it says about the people who are playing on these as some sort of controversy is very sad. There is no validity to any of the arguments as those were identified as simply wrong well over two thousand years ago. The fact that effort has had to be made to review very basic knowledge about geology, astronomy, geometry and simple observation to counter this stuff is sad enough. Here is one good and very basic explanation of where these people have gone wrong in terms of middle school science. But this issue is not one that has anything to do with geology or any scientific fact. It is the active collapse of the desire for truth and acceptance of superstition and simple ignorance as equal to the hard work of scientific knowledge. How comforting, know one knows anything and everyone lies. So my ignorance is as good as everyone’s knowledge.
Nope. This shows a basic ignorance of the scientific method that allows knowledge to be steadily raised to the level of truth. But no truth is absolute and that is also an even more fundamental truth. It also shows a lack of logic by accepting the error of using some to equal all. But what concerns me is that for most of the twentieth century the peak of American civilization was achieved by a population that recognized knowledge as complex and that required faith in the expertise that achieved that knowledge. That has been lost in a significant portion of our population. This is, of course, that portion that was manipulated by new social media propaganda techniques but was also willing to believe an endless stream of lies that laid the foundation for this cultural collapse.
None of this is new. The direct influence of social media is very new but bad information has always built immunity to more bad information for the majority. It still does for the majority but the size of the minority that is committed to believing bullshit, such as the earth is flat, is a sign of something new. It is an active theme of cultural self harm. It is the urge to cultural suicide. For much our planetary population we are amazingly close to being a new, scientific species. We have it within our grasp but it would appear that roughly a third or more of our population has gone over to self destruction. That is not logical or rational and can’t be dealt with by logic or reason. Perhaps it can’t be dealt with at all in the time that we have to do that.
This has been the question that has been debated endlessly since 2016 and the twin disasters of BREXIT and Trump. Those are the result of decades of growing failure to change while change driven by technology was doing it’s geometric advance in a world of arithmetic thinkers. We can lay the blame at the feet of the 18th century political and economic systems that gave us so much but had become uncontrollable and at the failure to manage information by maintaining objective standards of truth. Obviously these are related. The reluctance to face down old religions that had become violently destructive is a factor. These things were working themselves out and still are but we allowed ourselves to shirk planetary responsibility a little too long and our destruction of our atmosphere requires all of us to change the way we live right now. But those other problems destroyed to ability to define truth for a whole piece of the population plus those who just hadn’t yet made it to the post industrial world and are still caught in the spell of neolithic mythology. And now the choices are not easy and the time for people to sort themselves out is directly connected to the increase in destruction and death that we will face.
And that just makes it worse so the illusion of comfort in ignorance and superstition that say it’s ok to ignore everything because it is all lies must be eliminated. But that goes against the majority that has learned or is learning to love comfort and diversity and the amazing tools that are in our hands already with the power and promise of the universe that we are beginning to understand. But those who have given up and grabbed lies are fighting to make sure we all lose because, what else can they do? But all of us in the industrial and expanding post-industrial world actually know better. Hence the irrational emotions and denial because they know they are locked in bullshit. And we have more than a century of intellectual tradition that says that the authentic must be absurd and shocking. So that’s part of the game also.
That is what is on display here.
