Anti intellectualism in American Life:- Dumbing down

The Dumbing Down Of America: ‘The Numbers Speak Volumes’

Mac Slavo December 18th, 2017 SHTFplan.com Comments (70) Read by 4,192 people

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Almost everyone can see that the dumbing down of America is in full effect.  A video breakdown of a Psychology Today piece from 2014 which details the anti-intellectualism most of us have already experienced in some way.
According to Signs of the Times, there has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries. Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, describes how the vast underlying foundations of anti-elite, anti-reason, and anti-science have been infused into America’s political and social fabric. Mark Bauerlein, in his book, The Dumbest Generation, reveals how a whole generation of youth is being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital “crap” that is composed on social media.
Joe Joseph from The Daily Sheeple breaks it down in his new video. “You have plenty of these experts that are basically sounding the alarm,” he says. “Let’s keep it simple,” he continues. “I ask everybody a very simple question. If you think about what you learned from grade K to grade 12, give yourself a percentage of how much of that you actually use in your everyday life. Out of all of that information…now think about how much of your life experience weighs in.”

Joseph then goes over the statistics that have been compiled which are evidence of Americans getting dumber by the decade. Part of that, is because of the declining quality of higher education. After leading the world for decades in 25-34-year-olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place. The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010.
According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 68% of public school children in the U.S. do not read proficiently by the time they finish third grade. And the U.S. News & World reported that barely 50% of students are ready for college-level reading when they graduate:

We’re creating a world of dummies. Angry dummies who feel they have the right, the authority and the need not only to comment on everything, but to make sure their voice is heard above the rest, and to drag down any opposing views through personal attacks, loud repetition and confrontation. –Signs of the Times

The new elite are the angry social media posters; those who can shout loudest and more often, a clique of bullies and malcontents baying together like dogs cornering a fox. Rational thought is the enemy, says Bill Keller, writing in the New York Times.
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 Will Rodgers said, (paraphrasing) “that its not that people don’t know its what they think they know that just ain’t so”.

"The Revenge of Failure"

“The legend of our times, it has been suggested, might be "The Revenge of Failure". 
This is what Envy has done for us. 

If we cannot paint well, we will destroy the canons of painting and pass ourselves off as painters. 
If we will not take the trouble to write poetry, we will destroy the rules of prosody and pass ourselves off as poets. 
If we are not inclined to the rigors of an academic discipline, we will destroy the standards of that discipline and pass ourselves off as graduates. 
If we cannot or will not read, we will say that "linear thought" is now irrelevant and so dispense with reading. 
If we cannot make music, we will simply make a noise and persuade others that it is music.
If we can do nothing at all, why! we will strum a guitar all day, and call it self-expression. 

As long as no talent is required, no apprenticeship to a skill, everyone can do it, and we are all magically made equal. Envy has at least momentarily been appeased,and failure has had its revenge.” 
― Henry Fairlie (1924 - 1990)

"Morality Dilemma"

We Will Not Flag Or Fail

DECEMBER 7, 2017 – 7:15 PM

A reader from an Australian metropolis wrote me a little while back to describe the social and emotional difficulties of being a Right-thinking outlier in an overwhelmingly, and so often unreflectively and oppressively, Leftist culture. He needed some bucking up, I thought, and so I offered the following (slightly edited) reply. I don’t think he’ll mind my reprinting it here in the hope that it might offer some comfort to others in the same lonely predicament.

Dear ____,

I understand what you’re going through. I face exactly the same issues in my own relationships, all the time.

It’s very hard to push back effectively. There is a tremendous soggy weight of dogma always pressing down; it’s as if you are caught under a big wet circus tent that you have to lift every time you want to stand up to speak your mind.

Or perhaps the better metaphor is the one I’ve always used in the past: that we are swept along in a powerful stream, and as long as we drift with the current we don’t feel its power. Most people drift along in little groups, focusing only on each other, but some of us look at the banks of the river, and notice that we are being swept away to an unfamiliar landscape far from our home. We plant our feet on the bottom and try to grab hold of the people we care about, but immediately we feel the enormous power of the current, and it is all we can do to resist. Meanwhile our friends just think we’re acting very strangely indeed, and making things very unpleasant for ourselves and for them. It’s so much more pleasant to drift, you see, especially when everyone else is — and as soon as we put our feet down on the bottom everyone else is suddenly moving away with the current. (To them, it seems as if we are moving backward.)

All I can say is to tell you what I do — how I’ve managed to live in such a condition without going mad:

I tell myself that no matter what everyone else thinks, I’m going to look at the world as frankly as I can, gather my own information, and understand it as clearly as I can manage. I read a lot of history, and I learned a while back that if I want to learn the truth about history, I can’t learn it just from people writing about it now; I also have to read the books that were written while it was happening.

I seek out people who are also resisting the current. They are out there, and it is important to know that they are out there.

I refuse to be broken. I am blessed with reason and intelligence and wisdom, and I will not lay them aside. I will believe in myself, and I will be faithful to myself.

I have friends who respect my intelligence. I try to show them a living example of someone who doubts and questions and denies their secular religion, and who is yet still a friend they can respect. This is, I think, the most effective thing I can do: to show them that a decent, intelligent man of firm moral principles can question the things they take for granted and not be struck by lightning.

I want to make them doubt, even just a little, even just for a moment, the unholy doctrine of this new secular religion. If I can do that, if I can make that tiny crack in the wall, the flowing power of Truth will do the rest. I will believe that Truth is real, that it is mighty, and that it will prevail.

And I write. I write for people that, like me and you, need to know there are others out there. And I do it for myself, to bind and organize my understanding.

Okay, that’s enough, I think. Sorry to ramble on so. But you get the picture.

As Churchill said:

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Best,
Malcolm

P.S. Be of good cheer. The tide may be turning. The great, sustaining comfort is that we are Right, and they are wrong. Magna est veritas!

 http://malcolmpollack.com/2017/12/07/we-will-not-flag-or-fail/

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Joe Hill on December 10, 2017 at 8:06 pm said:

It is very hard to keep quiet or even to keep your sanity when all about you people are spouting nonsense. They say the canyons in California are burning because of global warming but the evidence is manifest that the canyons have always burned or at least have been burning for many hundreds of years. What has changed is that 21st century man is living in those canyons now and he is not adapted to the environment and he wants the fires to stop so he concocts a ridiculous theory that the fires are due to too many cars on the local freeway.

Similarly crime goes up and all the criminals are immigrants. Does he conclude that importing criminals is a bad thing or that these people are the products of a culture that may work fine for nomadic herdsmen but is ill adapted for 21st century urban life? No he concludes that the victims of crime are [due to] racist and xenophobic [attackers who are] thus foolish and malicious.

There is poverty, crime, and indolence among his people. Does he determine that they are getting the wrong incentives from government or the wrong feedback from society? No the problem is not that we reward absentee fathers and dole out money and benefits to those able-bodied people who do not work. The problem is racism. The poor dears would join the middle class but for a cabal of white men who prefer they stay poor and dependent. That theory itself is racist because it presumes the folks on the dole are not making a rational and intelligent decision.It assumes they have not done a cost-benefit analysis (or perhaps are incapable of doing one) and come to the conclusion that the welfare state works well enough for them. The effort to pull oneself out of dependency does not offer sufficient reward to make it worthwhile.

Thinking is a curse. It can isolate you from the herd and leave you vulnerable. Nobody likes the guy shouting “just stop a minute and consider”. He rocks the boat and disturbs the force.

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Shelagh on December 10, 2017 at 9:48 pm said:

I can understand that for many people it comes as a shock to discover that they are “going against the flow”.

That is where I have the advantage.

I have always objected to “going with the flow”. I hate the feeling of being crammed into the box which dogma of any kind (especially totalitarian leftist groupthink) assigns me.

I am all for thinking critically, not accepting anything at face value.

Tell me to do something and my immediate desire will be to do the
absolute opposite.

Growing up it was “cool to drink alcohol”. Every time I went out my friends would tell me to drink this or that alcoholic beverage till I found one I liked. I naturally refused. “Come on, we’re drinking, fit in by drinking too.” I simply refused. Orange juice is my drink, or perhaps coke zero.The more my friends pressed, the more I dug my heels in.

Don’t get me wrong, friends drink and I don’t object. Why should I object? So long as I can drink my fruit juice or my soda or water, they are welcome to their hooch.

And that experience has paid off for me time and again.

Some people want to impose their views on you, a sort of mental straitjacket and refuse you the right to think for yourself. Nothing irritates me more than the presumption that they have the right to consign me to an enforced intellectual slavery, where they stand over me cracking the whip and lashing me for not repeating their mantras.

It’s the height of arrogance.

I’d rather be around people who are happy to allow me some space to be myself just as I have the courtesy to let them have some space to be themselves…

Which is why the scolds of the totalitarian left strike me as such screechy crashing bores.

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It’s all about the pill you are taking.
What pill do you take? The red one… or the blue one…
Once taken you can never untake it.