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“I love the poorly educated” - You know who
Kennedy’s adult audience had lived through an economic boom they felt was the direct result of education and information. In the 40s millions of Americans received free education and training, either in the military or for skilled war production jobs, and/or were put through college with the postwar GI bill. The 50s saw an economic boom that heavily promoted education as the key to prosperity and national security.
Today’s audience thinks it’s the smartest, best informed generation in history because pretty much all of human knowledge is available with a few clicks, but instead of exploring that limitless pool spends its free time scrolling through arguments about uninformed opinions and who should be demonized for Liking the wrong posts.
Ouch.
While you’re kinda right , you’re also kinda wrong. Today we sure have the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, even for free (mostly). Back then everythink required way more effort. But we also had way more time to do so. People didn’t need to have two incomes or two jobs. When they were home, they were home. No 24/7 availability due to a phone.
But what did we do with the time? Reading tabloids and watching silly tv. Like people today scroll through social media. I’d argue it’s still the same, just the ways of ditching information changed. Gen z and younger aren’t per se dumber than boomers and older. The ways to get dumber or smarter just shifted.
Gen X myself, with always way too much spare time at hands to make observations and conclusions and gather information/knowledge. Which is also more easily done today than ever.
Multiple jobs and constant phone interruptions during free time are a worst-case scenario. I personally only know one guy with 2 jobs (private music teacher and uber driver), and I know people from their 20s to retirees - in fact my RPG group spans that whole swath of ages. We meet twice a week at my house for 3.5 hours, and I can’t even remember a time when anybody got interrupted by a phone call. Your experience may vary, but I don’t think multiple jobs without a spare moment is the norm at all. People today just zone out mindlessly on phone feeds like they used to on sitcoms.
One subtle difference between yesterday’s newspapers and today’s info feeds is that you could finish a newspaper. You could read what you wanted, be done with it and put it down. A feed is an endless firehose - you never get the subtle satisfying feeling of being done with it. I think most of us have an innate desire to finish things. Our natural instinct is to get through the endless in-box by spending as little time as possible on each item - we absorb minimal information, make a quick value judgement, mentally swipe left/right on it and scroll ahead to the next little task. This builds a habit of snap judgements and meme-level thinking that gradually makes our whole mental process more superficial. We actually have as much time as we used to, it just feels like we don’t because so much more stuff is available to process.
Yes, you’re right and summed it up well. This indeed is a big difference with newspapers & co and social media. I myself have found me in this scroll-trap. It’s just this one more entry… Yet the difference between tv and social media is not the same. You can slowly wither in front of the tv too. I grew up with just 3 stations but even then you could mindlessly consum forever. Stopped tv totally when i was 20 or so and never had one again.
As with the phones, that might surely vary. I personally don’t know, mine is totally silent, only wifey can ring me, the rest of the world can write me a mail or use telegram. But i know a lot of people, from poor to immensly rich, which are constantly interrupted by their phone. Call here, message there, notification in the middle. It always seems like they’re total slaves to their devices and are “pavloved” to the ding.
But ofc this is equally just anectodal “evidence”. But it’s a possbility which, back then, wasn’t there. If you left work, you were gone. Today boss could reach you anytime.
I’m retired since forever now, but sometimes just worked for fun some months and already noticed how pissed some bosses are when you’re not 24/7 commited and always there in an “emergency”. Maybe that’s a german thing, i dunno.
Unrelated but: i envy your rpg-group. I never in my life happened to stumble upon enough nerds to actually do that. But always wanted 😊
It’s always good to read comments that go deeper than meme-level thinking. It’s true that some people are absolutely ruled by their phones, and can’t even sit on the toilet for a minute without having some sort of content to scroll through. You can definitely find worthwhile reading material online but IMO most web content is equivalent to junk TV, and is designed to do the same thing - provide eyeballs for advertisers. Attention spans have shrunk to where a single line of slang-filled text is considered adequate analysis to reduce a complex issue to an airtight opinion. My endless bitching about it is probably similar to the early radio era when people complained that the art of conversation was dying. Somehow the world survived anyway.
Yes, my RPG group is truly great, We’ve been playing for about 5 years now, having met through Meetup.com - there’s a whole D&D section. I created a meetup for 1st edition AD&D and a bunch of people responded. We played at a game store for the first year, but I realized that for what I spent on a sandwich and a beer for myself I could feed the whole group at my house, and without all the noise. I also love making food, and as an added bonus I don’t have to go anywhere. I kind of feel like the food is a reward for everybody else doing all the traveling, especially when the weather is bad. A couple weeks ago we had a power failure and finished the session by candlelight, which was a first. Anyway I highly recommend meetup.com if you want to try to find or start a game group.
We’re kinda on social media here, so deeper comments might be out of place 😁
I admit, i absolutely love my phone too and don’t go a meter without it with me. But it’s literally the device i couldn’t even fully dream about 30yrs ago. A tiny fraction of this marvel was in my wettest nerd-dreams. And no day passes where i wouldn’t be aware of that. Yet, beside using lemmy, i never used any social media at all. I don’t even consume Youtube or netflix or whatever.
This massively shrunken attention-span is really noticeable. Not only when seeing youngsters scroll through tons of content, deciding in an instant if this minute that “article” takes, is even worth stop scrolling. It’s palpable in the way it all is made/presented. Videos instantly starting so you might get a hint of interest before scrolling further. It’s horrible, from design to execution to content itself. And yes, all is just built around selling us shit or sell us to shit.
THIS is not the net i dreamt about and was part of its creation. This is the net that’s ripe for euthanasia and a new start. Why does everything has to turn to shit when it hits mainstream? (rethorical question sadly)
Oh yeah your group sounds totally rad. And your thought of exchanging good food for the hassles of travel is just totally adorable. I know meetup, yet it’s not that filled up here (krautland), it’s probably way more valid in the US (i just assume you’re from there). Besides I’ve grown way too anti-social to even consider trying it. So it’s just a regret that i never did this in my life when i was more social.
Three big things:
- Compartmentalization of media (echo chambers)
- Tribalism (thanks Russia!)
- Macho culture (treating politics like a college football game except being LESS informed)
We’ll never recover from this. This is the United States of Ignorance now. I’m deeply sorry to those who did their part and will be victims in the future, but it HAS to get worse before it can get better. We need a great reset in some form. Revolution, world war, alien invasion…
This is sort of my train of thought, however, historically, when that sort of thing happens, very rarely is the resulting government a unfucked democratic nation.
I hope there are enough people with actual core American values that rise to the top if/when it happens.
My hopes aren’t high, but they’re not high with the status quo either.
Let’s go aliens!!!
I vote for giant sinkhole
That would be amazing!
LOL neither the media nor Russia created tribalism or echo chambers. They’re just the digital equivalent of immigrants creating ethnic neighborhoods. People are more comfortable around others who speak their language and share their background. Give them all the variety in the world and most of them will flock to their own kind.
But I totally agree America is the United States of Ignorance and won’t recover from it. Not just ignorance but incapability - in spite of a flourishing DIY culture, Americans in general can’t DIY their way out of a WalMart. They don’t even think up to them to solve anything, because every problem is either somebody else’s direct fault or was inevitable because of conditions somebody else created. It’s a nation of spectators whining that all the shows suck.
Well that went well didn’t it
I wonder why he ended up with a bullet in his head.
Because…
Grandpa Joe worked with the mob rum-running, in order to amass the family fortune, and fhey in turn delivered several major cities in the election, but then JFK let RFK Bobby loose on an aggressive anti-racketeering rampage
Among other reasons ofc
I can guess what he means by the other points but I wonder how being more educated means being more free?
Liberty consists of the capacity to make meaningful choices; those ignorant of their choices cannot possibly make them. Ignorance itself is a kind of tyranny which chains people.
Harder to be taken advantage of if you know the means by which one takes advantage of another.
Knowing the wealthy need you more than you need them lets you make stronger demands and form unions.
Being knowledgeable gives you job security and independence, you have intrinsic value as a capable resource - and if spurned can become a troublesome enemy because you understand your opponent and can take advantage accordingly
Knowledge is absolutely power, and power gives you opportunity for freedom to choose how to live your life.
one way is, that if you do not know the impact of policies, you cant make informed decisions about them and thereby lose control over your life and environment.
because uneducated people are easy to lie to.
Not strictly: he says only an educated people can be a free one, meaning that all free peoples are educated ones, but the inversion of that is “No uneducated people can be free”. By that, I assume he means that uneducated people are far more susceptible to deception and manipulation compared to the educated that will be better able to detect lies, point them out and understand explanations of why that’s bullshit.
As an example: If I tell you that the “vaccines cause autism” study was a) just a pilot study, not an actual one at scale, b) heavily fudged to the point that one scientist was kicked off the project for refusing to falsify results, c) only examined a specific vaccine, the MMR combination vaccine usually given to infants and d) led by a guy that had financial stakes in a company trying to sell individual vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, you can probably smell the bullshit.
If I tried to explain that to someone who’s not educated enough, they’ll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of “Well, you never know what to believe these days” and change absolutely nothing about their stance.
Things get far worse when someone tells their base that some group is capturing and eating their pets and ends up inciting violence by people who take him at face value.
Edit: I don’t know why I said “harmless” there. Anti-Vaxxers aren’t harmless, even when compared to incitement of hate crimes.
If I tried to explain that to someone who’s not educated enough, they’ll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of “Well, you never know what to believe these days” and change absolutely nothing about their stance.
Wow, I never knew I had conservative-related PTSD, but here I am having vivid and terrifying flashbacks to just that scenario.
I could try to come up with some bullshit home remedy solution and insist “That’s what my pa alwys did, helps every time!” and when it doesn’t work for you, double down angirly “Well it works for my pa, you’re just doing it wrong”?
Or I could acknowledge that I’m not actually qualified, and all I can do is say “Sorry to remind you of that”
We’ve now seen what the ignorance of 10 million who don’t bother to show up can do.
That’s how many Democrats voted in 2020 but not this year, and are blaming the results on “the party”. Nope, it was you fucktwats.
Don’t worry. Plenty of blame to go around. The fuckwad voters who enabled fascism by staying home, and the fuckwad party elite who couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a map and lost a lay-up election to fascism through their own venality and incompetence.
And don’t forget this (from 2016):
How the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately “elevated” Donald Trump with its “pied piper” strategy
It’s still paying dividends, apparently.
They suck at campaigning, but they aren’t the worst at governing. An informed voter doesn’t require razzle dazzle, but alas we are in short supply of informed voters. I don’t see that turning around anytime soon, so buckle up buttercup!
Nah, they suck most at governing. People were tired of things getting worse every year under Democrats. Things get worse faster under Republicans, but the Democrats didn’t do enough to prevent our societal decay into feudalism. They’re corrupt as fuck, especially where they have supermajorities. Every law to address problems is another scheme that helps the rich. They never take a stand against business, not understand that there is currently no way to serve both capital and labor.
I’m looking forward to get my crippled ass Aktion-T4ed in the coming years, so you could say I’m buckled up
No I voted and still blame them. People were vocal about their concerns and intentions to not vote months before the election and the campaign ignored them and somehow that isn’t their fault.
Also the 10 million, like you said, were ignorant. It wasn’t the ultra-impassioned grandstanders that affected an election. It was people that saw the last 4 years relatively boring politics as a license to tune out and figured this election wasn’t something they needed to worry about. Those people exist in far FAR higher numbers than anybody actually paying attention
I don’t think repeatedly telling people how important voting is and pleading with them to vote and to get other people to vote is “ignoring” it. What I blame the Democratic party for is not cultivating younger candidates for years and years. There should have been a broader field of viable candidates to narrow down based on public opinion, or at the very least grooming Harris as a likely candidate throughout Biden’s term instead of swapping her in as an emergency backup. Having said that, there’s no excuse for “I’m not voting because there isn’t a good enough candidate!” is the mentality of petulant high school sophomores who refuse to brush their teeth because they’re mad at mom for making them miss soccer practice to go to a dentist appointment - I mean, she’s such a bitch, I’m just gonna let my teeth rot in protest!
For sure, but if you tell that kid to just fall in line because you know better, you’re going to get an even more obstructive petulant response to your request. You have to meet people as individuals and let them in on the vision if you want them to be invested in it. Most of the messaging I saw however, was people taking any and all opportunity to display their superiority to anyone that doesn’t immediately fit into the plan
We’re talking about voters not kids, and if you think the message was, “Just fall in line because I know better,” you weren’t paying attention. The Harris campaign bent over backwards to warn people about the dangers of an impending Trump dictatorship. Some people just didn’t listen, or they can’t see significant differences between the Harris and Trump. I can’t even engage with any of that, because to me it’s as stupid as insisting the Earth is flat. Whatever, we are where we are.
Well, ooooobviously that’s because the democrats cheated in 2020 and then inexplicably, while in power, decided not to cheat in 2024. Obviously.
Massive /s.
Tbf. 152 million votes counted so far in 2024 and just shy of 160 million voted in 2020. Every swing state had record turn out except Pennsylvania which was close. There was bound to be less votes with people working and mail in ballots not valid to do because covid in some states. Most the votes lost were in states that outcomes were the same in 2020. She lost by 250k people in 4 states. These people flipped or some sat home while more showed up for Trump she lost because of not getting better turn out in those states she even beat Bidens numbers in some of these states.
This criticism of democracy is way older than Kennedy. Socrates thought democracy impossible due to the ignorance of the common person.
And that’s what this is, an argument against democracy. A vote cast by a shut-in illiterate who chooses candidates based on their astrology sign is just as valid as the chair of the political science department. Anything less than that is an argument for weighted or exclusive suffrage. You can believe in democracy or the “low information” voter, but not both.
Acknowledging that democracy as glorified sortition is not actually in any way better than sortition is not an argument against democracy; it is an argument for creating the circumstances in which an active citizenry meaningfully and knowledgeably participates in the civic life of their polity. It’s not about ‘weighting’ or making suffrage exclusive, it’s about creating a society in which good citizenship is enabled and valued by the institutions of society.
creating the circumstances in which an active citizenry meaningfully and knowledgeably participates in the civic life of their polity
Why stop there? If your project requires an improved humanity to work, why not just improve us until we don’t need governance?
You do realize that an educated citizenry is not some superhuman impossible feat for our genetic code, right
I have no more faith in this Democracy (and I mean globally). To the point where I literally cannot bring myself to participate in the silent acceptance which is voting.
Edit: to prevent this from sounding like my Edgelord Master’s thesis, as I see it, Democracy is now one two things:
- a lie we’ve been fed from the very start
- a noble idea which has been twisted and corrupted beyond any recognition
In either of those cases, it feels like I’m being forced to pull the lever and decide who gets killed by the tram. So I choose to never again touch the lever as long as the death of something is the only outcome.
The whole thing with the “trolley problem” is that blood is on your hands regardless. Not touching the lever doesn’t stop the trolley and can lead to more death.
In the recent voting case not pulling the lever put lgbtq, disabled, immunocompromised, minorities, Ukraine, remnants of democracy and a habitable planet on the tracks. The other track had Palestinians and could have been shifted away with enough protest.
The other track had Palestinians and could have been shifted away with enough protest.
The Palestinians were on both tracks.
Oh, no, had I the chance to vote in the USA (not American), I would’ve voted for anyone who wasn’t a Trump adherent, just to prevent The Orange Man from participating in the unfolding of history any more than he already has. Don’t get me wrong, I’m frustrated and disillusioned, not stupid.
But in other places, such as my country, we’re well past the point of that choice even being on the table.
so then what else are you doing? are you out protesting, boycotting, participating in mutual aid?
As much as I can. Truthfully, there’s not much of that going on around these parts, but yes, I try as much as I can to find ways to act against the choices with which we are presented nowadays.
To be clear, I am not against Democracy as a fairer-than-most political system, my meaning was related to the Democracy-that-is. Just like I appreciate Socialism, but not Stalin’s brand of such.
I think it’s still good to go vote to keep the worst from happening and to improve the circumstances for emancipatory struggle.
But I also think voting is one of the lesser important levers, compared to activism, organizing, unions and so on.
Both, giving up using levers and cosplaying trying by just voting for a shitty neoliberal mess and watch them making people frustrated enough to vote for trumpf and not doing anything else are irresponsible at the end of the day
Normally, I’d agree with you in regards to voting, but this endless cycle of always choosing the lesser evil while the obvious and truly necessary solutions are either underrepresented or not even represented at all (depending on country) is an exercise in futility and only ever serves to obfuscate the goalposts, like digging our own hole. Feels like the illusion of choice nowadays. Maybe this would’ve been effective given a lot of time, but with the accelerating degradation of socio-economics and the planet itself, I strongly believe we’re just wasting time dancing around the problem.
I always at least cancel my vote when there’s nothing to choose from so they can’t use my name for voter fraud (we’ve had thousands of dead people showing up in voting registries and skewing the numbers, this is how bad things are around here), but that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing in the past decade, with a few notable exceptions which didn’t affect things in the long run. What we now have on offer are: a combo of lukewarm buzzwords pertaining to climate protection (while changing as little as possible) with regressive social policies on the “Left”, a not-quite-Fascist, or a straight-up Fascist. Yes, here as well! Yay!
I agree with you that civic action is the most important element nowadays, can’t wait for the day when more people’ll pick up on that.
So, yeah. I don’t normally like to do this, but Plato may have been right, unfortunately. At least as far as the contemporary context is concerned.
I feel everything you say. We need radical critique, grab things by their roots, stop dancing around.
But thinking, and I guess platon (as a pro philosopher) didn’t cover that, is mostly dialectical with doing, with everyday social practice. IRL they don’t seperate as the cognitivist and voluntaristic understanding of enligthment implies.
