In the endless glorification of mediocrity, we now we live in a country where, to borrow words from Isaac Asimov, "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge." How are we to be a self-governing nation-state when not only do we not have an informed citizenry, we have an intentionally MISINFORMED citizenry, and these citizens are being routinely misinformed by their elected representatives? CAN ANYONE DENY THAT WE HAVE FAILED? Quote from "Idiot America" by Charles P. Pierce: THE WAR ON EXPERTISE "The founders were men of the Enlightenment, fashioning a country out of new ideas—or out of old ones that they’d liberated from centuries of religious internment. The historian Charles Freeman points out that “Christian thought…often gave irrationality the status of a universal ‘truth’ to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated, and the miracle to the operation of the natural laws.” In America, the founders were trying to get away from all that, to raise a nation of educate people. But there were not trying to do so by establishing an orthodoxy of their own to replace the one at which they were chipping away. They believed they were creating a culture within which the mind could roam to its wildest limits because the government they had devised included sufficient safeguards to keep the experiment from running amok. Slowly, but with gathering momentum, the realization is dawning on people that we have lived through an unprecedented decade of richly empowered hooey." ~Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America (New York: Doubleday, 2009), p. 29.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 14:25:53 +0000
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