I recognized the voices of those callers and, from previous decent conversations I'd had with them on the radio, knew them to be people with far more intelligence than they showed in their engagement with me last week. Their performance -filled as it was with logical non sequiturs and an apparently complete lack of interest in knowing actual facts""seems evidence that our countrymen are being disabled and diminished by the political forces they rallied to defend.
The regime, it seems, is teaching them how to not think, how to close themselves off from anything that might awaken them to the ways their rulers are deceiving them.
Years ago, I read a definition of "neurosis" as "a form of learned stupidity." In other words, people might learn -as an adaptation to the pathologies of a particular environment""how not to see what is before their eyes and not to think clearly about the true meanings of their experience.
In America now, what is happening is not at the individual level of neurosis, but at the larger cultural level where the ruling powers have created an environment to induce a collective blindness and inability to think clearly.
This form of consciousness --the intentional product of propaganda and manipulation""can be seen as a form of "taught stupidity."
It was this that appalled me in my recent foray into Bush country: to think that the greatest power in the world now draws its strength from the intellectual crippling of millions of our countrymen.
The regime, it seems, is teaching them how to not think, how to close themselves off from anything that might awaken them to the ways their rulers are deceiving them.
Years ago, I read a definition of "neurosis" as "a form of learned stupidity." In other words, people might learn -as an adaptation to the pathologies of a particular environment""how not to see what is before their eyes and not to think clearly about the true meanings of their experience.
In America now, what is happening is not at the individual level of neurosis, but at the larger cultural level where the ruling powers have created an environment to induce a collective blindness and inability to think clearly.
It was this that appalled me in my recent foray into Bush country: to think that the greatest power in the world now draws its strength from the intellectual crippling of millions of our countrymen.
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