The Awakening of Intelligence
The meaning and purpose of communications is to awaken the intelligence of others -- and not as it has become in mass communications, the systematic design of suppressing intelligence to one’s will -- through persuasion at best, but more often than not, coercion, intimidation, ridicule, testimony, “correctness” -- and all the other well-known practices for molding the public opinion to one’s desires.
Those practices and techniques in the hands of the highly skilled, are an art -- but in the hands of the unscrupulous, is the major crime of these times -- of providing misinformation and disinformation to others, to one’s exclusive advantage -- which they then use the institutions of official power, to selectively enforce against their competitors and opponents. When intelligence is awake and aware, such manipulations and deceptions are obvious to even the most gullible and naive, and so the whole point of such “communications,” is to lull one to sleep, into a state of unconsciousness and indifference to all that is going on.
It might even be advocated as society’s highest virtue and categorical imperative -- of no longer being able to tell any differences for themselves (discriminate), and so they increasingly need other people to tell them what to think on every subject matter -- that explodes in complexity and difficulty that the average person had no awareness of, until the utter futility and desperation was brought to their attention by the latest wave of experts that were now necessary just to endure another perilous day.
It is not intelligence to know all the things one doesn’t need to know -- but to be able to distinguish ONLY what one needs to know -- in an age of abundant information and the prolific means of accessing it anytime one really needs to. But just doing it because one has nothing better to do, and wants to occupy one’s time in meaningless activity, is really a mark of stupidity masquerading as intelligence.
Out of the mountains of information, the intelligent know that only a very small percentage, is actually relevant to their concerns and makes a significant difference; the rest is not even nice to know, but is the smokescreen even the earliest philosophers recognized as the deceptive shadows on the wall. Every person of wisdom, has gone on to warn against mistaking the shadow and the smoke, including words and thought -- for the real.
The peculiarity of the previous century’s infatuation with mass media, was actually to promote the preference of the “image” over the real -- that the advance of further communication technologies, seek to resolve. Chief among them is that information is no longer centrally controlled -- by the powers that in the past, claimed that knowledge as their exclusive jurisdiction. They’d even pass laws prohibiting the use of many words except for those properly certified by themselves -- or at least, try to give that impression.
The uncertain were always intimidated back into their slumber of not wanting to know -- because it was made so tortuous to their participation. That was their whole point.
Knowing the few things truly worth knowing -- rather than all that can be known -- is the distinction of an "educated" person. That is all one needs to know.
posted by Mike Hu @ 9:59 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
The “problem” of education is largely this acquisition and accumulation of knowledge in the old way -- that now becomes counterproductive when the mind can quickly and easily become overburdened and overrun with “information.”
So the question is no longer, “How much can one know?” -- but “What is the least one can know, that allows them to figure out the rest on their own” -- as one really needs to in encountering a particular challenge? That is what is worth knowing -- and no longer, everything that can be known, which is likely to be more false than there is truth.
So the real purpose of education now, is to cultivate a mind that is impervious and invisible to the false -- rather than the old mind, and the old education pedagogy, of simply learning what can be “taught” -- which is not a mind that can discover anything for itself, and learn the truth that is not “taught,” mostly as politically correct propaganda these days -- invariably about the critical need to pay the teachers more than everybody else.
I guess one could call that the STEM approach to education -- the basic science, technology, engineering and math -- necessary to live effective daily lives, without all the problems of the past, including the NEED for more education -- which implies ignorance, inadequacy and dysfunction.
There's already a successful model pioneered by the community colleges in just teaching practical skills and knowledge -- that could be done at the earliest levels -- before kids become turned off by the traditional education experience -- just because it was always done that way before.
The purpose of education should be to prepare one to meet the challenges of their daily living -- instead of merely providing job security for teachers. That is the well-known failure of contemporary (public) education.
A truly educated and intelligent society would have no need for teachers -- as everyone would be capable of teaching themselves, once they learned the basic skills of civilization -- which should be fewer, as societies become more civilized and less exploitative.
Then every student becomes their own master -- and is not just told what to believe as the truth that they should never question --
-- And the job of the "media," is never to let them know about.
Likewise, in a healthy society, the need for health care should decline as people become healthier -- on their own will to do and be so.
So this kind of mentality that people cannot be convinced to be in optimal well-being and condition is the result of bad conditioning and not the inevitable tendency to deterioration that many would just rationalize as the normal process of "growing up and growing old."
Those are largely learned patterns of behavior and being -- that as time goes on, we see many more disprove. Those are the role-models who should be teaching in classrooms as in life -- as the proof of the value of that education.
If the teacher does not have that basic competence and respect, of course their jobs will be impossible. But that doesn't mean they can't be successful at learning themselves.
Post a Comment
<< Home