Ignorant and Free? Not Likely.

“The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly... it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”— Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister

Change is hard; perhaps, for most people, the most difficult of all life choices. When the change is that of a group, a nation, or a culture, it is close to impossible. But we must change.

We must change because in god’s firmament there are things inexorable. You get out of the way or you are crushed. In the same way that an asteroid-sized rock hurtling out of deep space can, and will, blast its way through the thin panoply of atmosphere that protects us, to smash into the planet, and destroy everything where it hits, there are societal, national, and world events hurtling down upon us now, forces unleashed upon us by our own humanity, that cannot be stopped, only evaded. Perhaps.

Neither does that pleonasm of mine make any difference. It doesn’t make any difference who caused it or who is at fault. What is important is that we must change. It doesn’t make any difference, either, what anyone’s opinion of the matter is. When the catastrophe is upon us, it won’t make any difference what anyone there believes, he’ll be crushed like everything else.

And therein, that last, lies part of the reason we’ve come to this sorry pass. Homo Sapiens, U.S. version, has lost many of the evolution-given strengths he once had. In fact, he’s lost the critical one.

Man’s critical strength, the one whereby he came to ascendancy among his fellow life forms, is intellect. The world is a place where the strongest survive, and intellect is the great force multiplier. Among the puniest of god’s creatures where muscle-derived, weapon-equipped defense or attack is concerned, man alone – or at least, primarily – was able to derive means by which to increase many times his ability to survive. Lacking physical parity with things preying upon him, he was smart enough to hide or evade.

In fact, man’s intellect was at times his worst problem. What he came to call science would overtake him, and he would, often sometimes, injure or kill himself. While even that was sometimes hidden from him by certain of the other of his characteristics – acquisitiveness, or concupiscence, for instance – probably nothing made him as aware of his perhaps species-destroying tendency in that regard like what he called the industrial age. He had by this time grown smart enough to recognize the causes of his discomfort, illnesses, and death.

Smart enough to run from fire in quantity like that of the prairie or forest volume, he also learned as industrial volumes of smoke turned to smog, he would typically run away temporarily, or, in the latter case, move away. Intellect, you know.

But just as his acquisitive, concupiscent, and questing nature often found man in his more primitive form intellectually ensnared in a trap of his own making, so did man in his industrially and technologically empowered intelligence paint himself into the proverbial corners. Smarter than his fellow creatures as he is, man isn’t all that smart.

Perhaps a better way to say that is to say that man doesn’t like to think. In fact, I once wrote, man fears thought more than anything else in the world. Thought, after all, is merciless to privilege, to established institutions, and to comfortable opinions. To man’s society and governments, thought is anarchic and lawless; it’s indifferent to authority, and indifferent toward the “wisdom” and religiosity of Man.

The result is that, just as he would have others work for him – slavery seems to come to him as naturally as capitalism, and his fondest desire is to become a tyrant - he would much rather have someone do his thinking for him, too. Unfortunately, especially where his religiosity is concerned, his fear of thinking has a corollary. Man also hates truth, and for all the same reasons he fears thinking.

And, if we define religious as a believing intuitively – i.e., immediately and without ratiocination – and without the possibility of being proven wrong, there are many religions (including, incidentally, atheism). Among his most tenaciously held belief is religion, the result being that he would much rather not think about it.

With every new event of sufficient proportions to become national news (I ignore the obvious exception, which is anything sufficiently lurid or religious to promise a huge viewing audience for the television networks), we see it all acted out and demonstrated. With almost any such event, there are already polarized opinions, and the “debate” on almost any issue resembles exactly that of an argument having to do with religion or any other polemical game where the opponents must not concede.

The bizarre result is that politics has begun to supplant science as a method for determining and defining reality, each and every issue decided not by science or reason, but by popularity – vote of the ignorantly intuitive, easily duped and led masses.

Some years ago a university study provided for kindergarten and first-grade level children in several of the industrialized nations to play the game of tic-tac-toe. Japanese, Chinese, German, Swedish, French, and other nations’ children played for a few minutes, then recognizing the futility of trying to defeat anyone paying attention, became bored, and looked for something else to do.

The U.S. children, however, went on playing resolutely, determined to win. Fights broke out, things were thrown, and furniture overturned. Furious, the children would have rioted, were it not for their ages and the presence of supervisors.

One can see similar behavior everywhere these days, none more frequently than political talk shows now ubiquitous on television. Every new event becomes a political issue, with demagogue politicians at the heart of it all. Nowhere, interestingly and suggestively, does one find a logician, mathematician, statistician, or physicist moderating the invariably nonsense-riddled “discussion” or “debate." Were one to interject proven truth into the programming, there can be little doubt, the entire production would again become news, something the now stultified and stupefied, sensation-craving public wouldn’t watch.

Take, for example, the, hideous events at Virginia Tech a few days ago. Because firearms were involved, two of the loudest sociological factions in our society had begun ginning up their propaganda machines almost before the echoes of the gunfire had faded into quiet. So intuitive and religious is the dialectic that almost anyone familiar with the debate having to do with, for instance, the Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design controversy could use the same script that will be used for the debate concerning gun control. Just substitute names and terms – everything else is pro forma, a specious zero sum game with two parts. Tic-Tac-Toe.

Yet another corollary to the fact of hated thought, and hated truth, is hatred for provable facts. The fact observable by anyone interested enough is that the U.S. public detests any question that has a logical, mathematical, or scientific answer. Atop that is the peculiarly “American” religious dogma holding that we are somehow right about everything. That’s intuitively, of course. Any scientific examination is “un-American,” and ‘traitorous.”

Fascinated with the implications of the Tic-Tac-Toe study, I’ve examined the state of polemical discourse in the nation for more than four years now. For two years before that, I taught in local schools at all levels and participated in scholastic competitions all the way to the state level. Rita, my wife and a teacher of forty years experience at all levels, agrees when I say that “Americans” are losing the ability to think – that is, to reason effectively to a logical conclusion. Problem-solving skills are now at a level lower than either of us has ever seen before, and we find few teachers of long experience who do not agree.

The few who do not agree, interestingly enough, disagree on strictly religious or political grounds. The truth is forbidden by their religious or political creed.

What I learned during my study, among other things, was that the people of the U.S. do not make mistakes. They are never wrong. They are, you see, entitled to their opinion. “Entitled to your opinion,” moreover means they cannot be wrong. And being blessed by constitutional decree with infallibility, of course, means they are right. Everyone else must therefore be wrong. When two people or groups who cannot be wrong are somehow opposed by societal vicissitude, the obvious occurs – the Tic-Tac-Toe, Little League brawl.

Time and again – all but invariably – persons faced with incontrovertible and categorical disproof of their contention became verbally abusive. One gentleman, arguing the atheist position in that debate insisted that my proof of the existence of a creator (whether god is a matter of definition), was “circular.” How was that? I asked. Unable to demonstrate his (entirely intuitive) contention, the man resorted to a string of nasty insults (not only that, he then eventually accused me of insulting him). When, in my studied (don’t forget, this was a carefully constructed research project) manner, I took argument after argument promulgated by one debating adversary after another apart with incontrovertible mathematical, logical or scientific proof, the result was not concession, but rage.

Tic-Tac-Toe rage, you might laughingly call it – except it’s not funny.

The loss of intellect, the intellect that I contend, like the ascendancy of man over the rest of nature made the Land of the Free ascendant over the nations of the world, is not funny. What I’ve discovered is nothing less than the fact that the primary reason for our distress today as a nation is loss of intellect, the “dumbing down” of the society and nation.
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Fully one-third of the persons I interviewed during a safari across the length and breadth of the U.S. could not construct and parse a simple sentence, and forty percent could not understand or solve even simple logical propositions. Six percent of those questioned could do even the simplest algebra. If I heard once the expression “I was never good at math,” I heard it five hundred times.

Repeatedly – sixty percent of the time – adult people could not solve simple verbal conundrums, not even classical ones part of societal lore during my childhood and adolescent years. One person in one hundred could in his head and without calculator or paper and pen correctly add a column of ten two digit numbers. Repeatedly, among strings of one hundred people, not one could do simple multiplication or division in his head, and among the same people, only seven in one hundred could so much as identify calculus.

Why do we care? Findings like these from my personal research are important to understanding of the effect of public stupidity on critical public debate of issues like that having to do, for instance, with the struggle between illegal aliens and the U.S. citizen their influx defrauds. The matter is one reducible by rather simple mathematics and logic, yet intuitive and emotional argument will likely decide it to the nation’s detriment, possibly - probably - crippling. And the issue is but one of dozens of similar weight.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, asserted Thomas Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.” We care because like the essential strength of society, especially ours, is the essential strength of the individual, intellect – the ability to think effectively on our own behalf. Without it, we are reduced to dependent servitude – slavery. More, we will almost certainly not endure as a nation.

We can’t operate a democracy like a game of Tic-Tac-Toe.