EDITORIAL
I am an old guy now. I grew up in a different time. We've been through all of that on this blog before. But I'm not sure that what I say penetrates the modern brain. In fact, I'm fairly convinced that the modern American brain has become trained to react rather than to engage in much critical thinking at all.
I'll get to politics in a minute, but before I do let's examine how the world deals with the modern American brain. Do you remember the studies done by Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner? They experimented with "classical conditioning", training animals, including humans, to react a certain way by a process of reward and punishment.
A few years ago I employed a nationally known expert who wrote the book on the use of dogs in drug interdiction, military, FBI and CIA operations. He showed me a video of how he had trained a road runner to bring lizards to him and drop them in his hand in exchange for a grape. It was his belief that any animal, including humans, could be "conditioned" to respond in a desired way.
It is quite clear that in today's world those who want to make a profit have learned to deliver to people what they want. Look at the things people crave: Fast food, high fat foods, sweet foods, sweet drinks, quick meals, cheap clothing, throw away furniture, replaceable cars, the newest gadget.
The next time you watch a popular TV show take a look at how many commercials there are for cell phones, cell phone services, Ipads, notebooks, computing equipment and fast food. People crave these things and those out to make money are right there to provide them.
You might say, "Well that's how capitalism works." You would be right, but, is there much in the way of "socially redeeming values" being advanced through these items?
Take for example the craving for all things new and flashy in the tech world. What is it that sells a cell phone? They all make phone calls, but the things that make them sexy are the quality of cameras, the ease of connecting with friends on social media, the brightness of the screen and the number of "apps" that make life fun through entertaining. From a distance it seems a little like giving a room full of imbeciles a bunch of hand mirrors and watching them laugh and stare at themselves in great delight totally engrossed in that activity.
Sure, you have given them what they want and what keeps them occupied, but what are they learning except how much fun it is to look at themselves and show others their mirrors?
Now let me ease you a bit into how this affects the American brain when it comes to politics. First let's examine the value of "online" education. As Google and other huge companies test the reaction of people to certain information and certain methods of information delivery to find the ones that people crave the most, they are in control of what you see, read and hear.
Over time they study your reactions and over time they stop feeding you things you don't like. Eventually you only get fed the things that keep your attention.
Secondly, online information is capable of the perpetual edit. Unlike books in print that are final once published and exist in multiple copies, the information you get online can be changed, altered, erased or edited at any time. There is no permanency to any of it.
As tastes change, as the study of reactions is refined those in charge of delivering information can tweak their offerings to increase consumption and in the process actually control or condition people to think a certain way and to believe certain "things".
Now consider how all of this has affected education. Because so much of education is dependent upon government funding, and because government funding needs some benchmarks by which to test the success of those expenditures, schools are trained that student performance on standardized tests is directly tied to the flow of money into the district. Therefore many schools "teach to the test", in other words, they spend far less time teaching things that won't be tested upon and much more time teaching the things the test will measure.
Those in the government who design the tests have alerted schools that little will be tested about American history except what has occurred AFTER the Civil War. Over time, as school after school teaches less and less about our founding principles, in order for students to perform well on tests, we end up with several generations of Americans whose brains do not contain the basic information about who we are, how we got here and why. This is the practice of classical conditioning.
Our founders were very well read in history. They were very familiar with the Bible, which many worshipped but even more recognized as a book of historical significance that chronicled the development of man, the use of brutality, the role of morality and the kinds of tyranny that had enslaved so many for so long.
But they also read and studied the history of the world from ancient times to their own. Their brains were vibrant, filled with thoughts, capable of critical thinking, comparative analysis and logical debate. They didn't just have ideas, they had a basis for their ideas which was grounded in facts, printed in books, unable to be modified except by the next better idea and then only if logic and reason prevailed.
Their notion was that God gave man all the liberty he would ever have and that over the course of time other men, for their own personal gain, had organized when necessary, used force with abandon and had worked to strip those liberties from free men in order to become God-like themselves. Our founders knew that this was not only a perversion of natural law, but that it was a reflection of the same evil that had beguiled Eve and had been working in the world ever since.
Fast forward to today.
We peck away at our smart phones, we browse Facebook to keep up with what others are doing, we shop online and our shopping habits are followed and a profile of us is created and those in possession of that information then feed us what they think we want and crave until eventually we see the world the way those who would use us for their own gain want us to see the world. We are being conditioned. Our brains are being chained.
Now let's talk about politics. It has been a problem for a long time that people quickly recognize. Politicians tell voters what they think the voter wants to hear. They get elected and then go back on their word, don't do what they promised, behave the same way as the guy they replaced and some voters get angry.
Over time from the position of incumbency the politician detects issues of greater appeal, uses the gullibility of people to pander to them and turn his/her office into a position grounded upon personality and relationships and only tangentially related to issues, and then only issues that are popular.
Newcomers to the game see the paychecks, see the glamor, see the ego feeding environment in which elected officials flourish and find their own way to get one of those jobs for themselves. They criticize the incumbent, they criticize the "establishment" they rightfully point out that promises were broken and that it is "time for a change".
They then pander to the voters what they want to hear. And already conditioned by years of pandering from the media, from marketers and from their education, voters have learned to salivate at the pandering. Repeat what the voters already think and you affirm them. Affirm the voter and you are identified as like him. Identified as like him you are the kind of candidate the voter wants to win, since he would like to win himself but lacks the courage.
Over time pandering has become the sales technique that has proven itself a winner time and time again. And the voter, conditioned by decades of training, is too dumb to know it. The cognitive dissonance of their predicament is too stressful and so they rush to the comfort zone of being unthinking pawns, reassured that their reactions are the result of critical thinking and placated by those who profit from their ignorance.
I'm an old guy now. I grew up in a different time. Hucksters, phonies and slick talking salesmen stand out against the background noise of the world very clearly for me.
But for the imbeciles staring at their modern day hand mirrors, their Iphones, taking pictures of themselves, sharing the details of their lives on the Internet they fail to see those on the other side of the two way mirror who are watching their every move, plotting how to enslave them and armed with more and more information every day they are dedicated to the goal of methodically controlling the minds of millions.
Today politicians who recognize how bad things have gotten will tell voters "it's time to think for yourself" which is perhaps the the most grotesque example of pandering ever devised. It is a rallying cry for those who have isolated out of the population the ones least capable of thinking for themselves, the voters most controllable by phrases and concepts, who want very badly to believe that they are thinking for themselves yet unable to accept that they are being played for profit by those who have studied them and know which buttons to push.
Can we escape this vortex of ignorance? Yes, but it won't be easy. It will require energy, and self initiative, reading and study, turning off the TV, limiting use of cell phones and Internet, and allowing your brain to calm down from a world of information overload. Then it will require years of reading the things our founders would have read, and sharing printed works with others, not debating from the first points we learn, but only after we have a full understanding of the plight mankind had endured until our nation was born, having first been conceived in the liberty that God gave us and then dedicated to the truth that no man is created better than another, or more capable of governing a life than the man who is living it.
There is always hope, but it thrives in the non-conformist, the well read independent thinker, the ones brave enought to challenge everything and courageous enough to trust God to set the course, light the way and lift up the weary. As one of my favorite founders, Patrick Henry is quoted as having said:
"Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God "who presides over the destinies of nations; and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave."
