Dumbing down is not your imagination or a figure of speech, but cognitive fact. Low information people know less facts and they are increasingly incapable of putting facts together in an integrated body of knowledge. The problem is mental and it's man-made. It's politically induced stupidity.
Thou shalt not generalize! There is no pattern.
UPDATE: The following is a great example of another typical postmodern stupidity, the Fallacy of the Running Nose. It is the result of their incapacity to draw the correct essences from a concept, leading to false equivalents. Saturation point is drawn from the subject of physics and here equivocated with the ability of a country to take in a great number of aliens whose values in many respects are contrary to its own. The analogy is completely false! We may assume Ms Maskell has had a fairly decent education. Then how is it possible she commits a crime against logic this huge? The answer is, it's brought on by her moral standard: the cause she is fighting for is so noble, that even truth and logic are subjected to it. The aim justifies the means is the moral standard of the true Pragmatist.
Aug. 8, 2015
New UKIP video slams Rachael Maskell MP for saying UK should take migrants until "Saturation" http://t.co/5bUXYpHZNr https://t.co/tjZ3tAtnF8
— UKIP (@UKIP) September 15, 2015
Aug. 8, 2015
THE MAN-MADE, LOW INFORMATION DISASTER
If you somehow have the impression that low information people are ignoramuses who are unable to think for themselves, you're right. It's shocking, but it's not inexplicable. Increasingly they are unable to take in external information and digest that into a comprehensive mental entity. Let alone them being able to integrate entire contexts or even subjects. They are literally unable to string two thoughts together. They are brainwashed, but that program merely fills the void. But how does one create that void in the first place? The seed of the problem must be sought in the anti rational thought of the Counter Enlightenment. (Source)Philosophical Skepticism is the position that neither affirms nor denies that one can have definitive knowledge of anything outside reality (including mental abstracts, like isms). From hereon things went downhill fast.
- David Hume's theory leads to the conclusion that no objective morality can be derived from reality. (Source)
- Kant regretted, but as our senses are imperfect, man is unable to obtain any objective knowledge whatsoever. (Source)
- Postmodern relativists have accepted Kant's position that man is unable to know anything. But that's just fine! In fact, they celebrate it. (Source)
Equality
Some would go even further than that: being Postmodernists, they made it into a moral issue. Cognitive absolutists who have the temerity to believe they know anything at all (let alone for certain), are evil people. Because to know anything for sure (referred to in those circles as "eternal truths") is leading inevitably to conflicts, war and to all the other evils generally associated with the history of the white man.
Credo number one among the relativist absolutist dogmatics is:
Thou shalt not generalize!
(Observant readers may have noticed the contradiction here. Do not embark on a quest of gotcha, because relativists will simply put that aside. The paradoxymoron has been accepted as a normal feature of the self constructed Universe.) (Source)
Their moral objection to universals is, that to draw a general statement from a number of specifics would inevitably mean discriminating against certain individuals to which the general conclusion does not pertain. A black duck is still a duck, but that is besides the point. The aim here is, mind control through language control, otherwise known as political correctness.
Their moral objection to universals is, that to draw a general statement from a number of specifics would inevitably mean discriminating against certain individuals to which the general conclusion does not pertain. A black duck is still a duck, but that is besides the point. The aim here is, mind control through language control, otherwise known as political correctness.
War on reason
And so a question about epistemology has become a matter of morality and a weapon in the tool kit of the Postmodern warrior against the evil civilization of the white man, who in his mind is associated with inequality, reason, science and technology (now a "grand Western narrative"), Capitalism and a Government that is necessarily limited to securing individual rights (as opposed to rights for unequal groups, or direct action (or positive discrimination).
Now, how do we get from this moral rejection to dumbing down, ignorance and the incapability of digesting information and the building of a body of knowledge?
The building of a body of knowledge is simply impossible without drawing general conclusions from a number of specifics, known as induction.
Dropping induction from the cognitive process involves following, basic mental (immaterial) entities:
- universals
- generalizations
- abstractions
- essences
- fundamentals
- principles
- concepts
- laws of nature
- standards
- philosophy
- science
- mathematics
- biology
- rights
- ideologies (including religion)
- planning
- methodologies
- codes of law
- context
to name but a few. Anything fixed is out the door. The integration of factual data, the maintenance of a full context, the discovery of principles, the establishment of causal connections and thus the implementation of a long-range vision have become impossible. Integration is the essential part of understanding. It has become impossible to know anything.
Education
Ever since Hume and Kant, philosophy has been striving
to prove that man's mind is impotent, that
there’s no such thing as reality and we wouldn't be
able to perceive it if there were.
The consequence is a chaos of subjective whims setting
the criteria of logic, of communication, demonstration, evidence, proof differing from man to man.
The only didactic method left to learn anything, is to learn chunks of information by heart. Now the predominance of memorizing is proper only in the first few years of a child's education, while he is observing and gathering material information. From the time we learn how to speak we reach a level that enables us to make concepts. Education requires a progressively larger scale of understanding and progressively smaller amounts of memorizing.
The only didactic method left to learn anything, is to learn chunks of information by heart. Now the predominance of memorizing is proper only in the first few years of a child's education, while he is observing and gathering material information. From the time we learn how to speak we reach a level that enables us to make concepts. Education requires a progressively larger scale of understanding and progressively smaller amounts of memorizing.
It is easy to understand that what we are dealing with here is induced, arrested development, literally dumbing down. It is no coincidence and no bad dream that entire cohorts of people are functioning at the mental level of a small child. This has been a conscious effort on the part of a group of academics for decades and as we have seen, it is morally legitimized.
There is a remarkable contradiction in the presentation of educators. They proclaim the importance
of developing a child's individuality, yet they train
him to conform to the group; they denounce memorization,
yet their method of teaching ignores the
requirements of conceptual development and confines
learning predominantly to a process of memorizing.
We're just scratching the surface of the evil we are dealing with here. We will explore the subject of mental sabotage further in future postings. Watch this space. If you want to participate in discussions, leave a comment or send a tweet to @Kassandra_Troy.
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