To Fight Back, Question Everything

American Thinker.com ^ | May 25, 2021 | J.B. Shurk

[Kaslin]

The world is so plagued by contradictions right now that I sometimes find myself quietly mouthing the opening sentences of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (and I bet I'm not alone in this admission). In terms of safety, health, opportunity, and prosperity, there has never been a better time in human history, but hardly anyone living anywhere is celebrating. Barack Obama sold "hope" on his march to power, but Black Lives Matter and Antifa preach only despair at every turn. An American government invested in projecting strength abroad stokes fear at home. It has never been easier to acquire knowhow of almost any kind, yet ignorance runs amok. How is this even possible when humans have never had greater access to information?

Before the printing press revolutionized mass communication in the mid-fifteenth century, nobody owned books. They were prohibitively expensive secret stores of knowledge possessed by a tiny percentage of monastic scribes and wealthy elites (many of whom were illiterate themselves). Within fifty years of Gutenberg's invention, more books were produced than during the previous thousand years. Still, just two hundred years ago, almost ninety percent of the world couldn't even read or write. Now almost ninety percent of the world is literate, and most of us walk around with little computers in our pockets that, along with an internet connection, allow us to retrieve almost every word that has ever been written about almost anything. If knowledge is priceless, and almost anyone can now scoop it up with the tap of a screen, we live in the golden age of universal wealth.

Then I take a quick look at Facebook or Twitter and remember that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

[No_Mas_Obama]

America is highly educated yet poorly educated. Their liberal democracy only works if the highly educated think for themselves. Since they don’t, their liberal democracy can only end in tears. If we are lucky we’ll get our our Republic back.

[marktwain]

Excellent essay.

We dope up our critical thinkers in school, and punish them.

We used to encourage them and guide them toward co-operation, morality, and excellence.

[OttawaFreeper]

The main thing I notice is that many people can emote as opposed to think and that is why we have a society not terribly different from the one depicted in the TOS episode “Return of the Archons” in which we had in one instance people mindlessly walking around in “vacant contentment”, as described by Mr. Spock and then immediately soon the “Festival”.

[Empire_of_Liberty]

“...most of us walk around with little computers in our pockets that, along with an internet connection, allow us to retrieve almost every word that has ever been written about almost anything.”

And within 50 years, we will be 90% illiterate, again.

[unread]

At last, some clarity.. Very good..!

[Lurkinanloomin]

We lost the Republic on Usurpation Day, January 20, 2009 because too many were ignorant of why the founders excluded the children of foreigners from being President with the natural born citizen clause.

Barack Obama should have been proof enough for anyone that they were correct.

[glennaro]

The great philosopher George Carlin used to say, "Don't just teach your children to read[.] ... Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything."

Carlin's words are insightful ... as was often the case. "Follow the science"; "Settled science" ... phrases tossed about by the ignorant and the politically compromised to advance, not "science", but a position or a philosophy.

Most people don't know, including those who cannot possibly not know, that this is how science works ... how science progresses. Science is rarely -- if ever -- "settled". Every scientific theory, every scientific discovery, every scientific conclusion, every scientific fact is not only always -- always -- open to question and debate, more often than not "the science" is modified ... even discarded as new discoveries are made.

This reality, to me, reveals the very essence of the beautiful French phrase joie de vivre.