Extremes among us
Often, extreme positions that we encounter directly or indirectly cause us related feelings of wonder, discomfort and fear. Wondering how it is even possible that someone today, in a developed stage of civilization such as ours, can be an advocate of attitudes that are a powerful combination of bizarreness, naivety and simple stupidity. Discomfort and fear are almost as a rule caused by exclusionary and vulgar attitudes, anti-civilization intoned, which we detect most intensively in the affective field. Therefore, we are somewhat afraid of such attitudes, it is understandable.
However, if we take a closer look at many phenomena that have already fairly established themselves in the public sphere, then extreme positions in society are not at all surprising, on the contrary. The earth is nothing but a flat plate. Vaccines are the fruit of the pharmaceutical industry, and more recently of Bill Gates, who use technology to reduce the population and, no less, to chip us with nanotechnology in order to control us. Traditional media is nothing but a reflection of global and domestic lobbies, and the only media truth is available in the unregulated field of social networks, popular influencers, Telegram groups and the deep web. Everyone lies to us, especially systematically, and we know that it is not much different in the field of human relations.
In recent years, many understandings, such as those already mentioned, which we thought were present only as a statistical error, like any atavism, have become, from a public point of view, completely normal options and understandings. The number of flat earthers is measured in millions, the number of anti-vaxxers has grown exponentially after the corona crisis. While flat-earthers are relatively benign, anti-vaxxers have a negative impact on the entire public health sector. Conspiracy theories abound, sometimes in those bizarre forms to which the human mind is prone, and sometimes, which is more dangerous, in violent public manifestations. Although extreme attitudes become interesting only when they start causing us practical problems, individual discomfort and social fear, they are largely related to the collapse of the educational system at all levels.
A society of ignorance
Education is nothing more than, said the Viennese philosopher Liessmann, a requirement for adequate understanding. Education has always been a sphere of human activity, the main goal of which was to develop in individuals the ability to adequately understand reality, the time and space in which we live, and relationships of all kinds, both on an individual level and social ones. Of course, the practical competencies needed for a functional life were also developed, as well as the more subtle ones - related to critical thinking, better and more humane reasoning and adaptation to life in society. But today, even though we are in an era of mass education and great availability of information, it does not seem that we are part of a particularly smart society. On the one hand, we are bombarded with the phraseology that our society is a society of knowledge, but still real social dynamics, from the academic world, the political world, and often human basic mechanisms, show that irrationality, ideology, superstition, relative dullness and creative primitivism rank high on the scale of desirable traits.
Namely, paraphrasing the Viennese philosopher Liessmann, we can ask ourselves what qualities such as discernment, curiosity, critical self-reflection and self-criticism will do us if they do not experience wider social affirmation. Those traits are simply not popular with most, let alone anything else. When critical views are understood as a sign of intellectual impotence, self-criticism as a prototype of weakness and insecurity, it is quite clear that almost every popular public discourse will be characterized by narrowness of view followed by irritable aggressiveness. Arguments in support of these claims are easy to find on social networks, and they are presented with almost equal fervor by intellectuals, public and cultural workers, as well as young and old political lions who fail to understand that relationships in the social arena are even a little bit more complex than the (own) dynamics. zoo.
Semi-educated examples from above
Education reflects the entire public sphere, shows its shortcomings and deficits, but also the consciousness of an epoch and time. While the agents of the education system, for example, fought militantly for the purity of the national language, which was supposed to be devoid of any foreign element, they completely lost sight of the fact that today's fast-paced generations use a limited vocabulary. Romanticized historiographies that they themselves wanted to establish as true led to completely distorted visions not only of the past but also of the present. The desire for success and monetization, that pragmatic and very understandable desire to monetize knowledge, translated into a relatively unproductive staff, devoid of all initiative and creativity, waiting for a monthly appanage. Then the educational lies from the top, diplomas from gas stations, the contaminated and suspicious academic path of public employees, the disproportion of educational needs with the labor market, all this has made us start to look at the whole education with skepticism.
Instead of education at least partially correcting us, humanizing us and standing us up, it only reinforced basic understandings of an often quite primitive character and gave such a color to the entire social sphere. The irritable and angry, forceful and limited color of our public sphere, accompanied by vulgar or lemonade rhetoric, is only a reflection of the fact that educational institutions have lost their corrective capacity or, more simply, that they have purposefully prevented people from adequately understanding reality.
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