We’re living in a very complex age. If you’re reading this on your phone, think how that would look to Benjamin Franklin. He would, no doubt, think it was magic. Increasingly, the average person is ignorant of most of the technology available to them. There was a time when adequate knowledge of our condition could be obtained with modest effort. But now, we’ve moved on to such things as DNA, Artificial Intelligence, self driving cars, and missions to Mars.
We live in a society where much of what we must cope with, is as magical to us, as the cell phone would be to Ben. It is simply beyond the average person’s ability to truly know. Even science has become so specialized that scientists opining outside their own narrow disciplines are dabbling in bullshit. The world is simply too complex for an individual’s total comprehension.
So increasingly, we rely on interpreters to guide us. Politicians, celebrities, and the notorious, with microphones and audiences, bridge the gap between our ignorance and the knowledge that is herding us, with their opinions. Sadly, their opinions hold no more value than your own. Yet, their station, leads us to give their thoughts far more weight than they deserve.
They are often wrong, spectacularly wrong. To stave off the resultant humiliation and loss of stature, they use the very same platform that enabled them to deceive us in the first place, to denigrate the source of knowledge that they perverted to deceive us. How can we hope to make good decisions, when the ‘facts’ we know are merely opinions presented by good looking, clean spoken, well connected frauds.
The first thing we must do is recognize the fraudulence. For example there’s no way in hell, that a thirteen year old child should be lecturing anybody on the complexities of climate. Furthermore, the news readers who expound on such an incongruous source of knowledge, are themselves exposed as lacking in even the most fundamental skepticism we should demand from opinion leaders. Lastly, any politician who dares to formulate policy from such drivel, is demonstrating their utter lack of rectitude.
That’s the way it goes today; a celebrity pretending knowledge, gets quoted by a pomposity, whose musings become the currency of failed lawyers, using bullshit to buy lucrative careers from a populace that has been educated by glossy magazines at the checkout. We must not allow ourselves the indulgence of settling for this corrupt bridge to knowledge. Knowledge has never been easier to obtain.
Go find it. Don’t settle for a newsreader’s bullshit. Shut the TV off and spend the time cruising for your own path to knowledge. You’ll be amazed at what you’ve been missing.