Why We Live in a Time When Ignorance Proudly Parades Itself as Enlightenment

[dajoki]

The Age of Ignorance
Why We Live in a Time When Ignorance Proudly Parades Itself as Enlightenment
https://eand.co/the-age-of-ignorance-de494767070

A President who suggests the answer to a global pandemic is…injecting disinfectant…drinking it…and that’s after he cut funding for the WHO. “Lockdown liberation” protesters who call the act of staying at home “slavery.” Government after government which disregarded warning after warning about said pandemic…to catastrophic effect.

When I look around the world today, I see shattering ignorance at work, like never before in our lifetimes. Shall I name a few kinds? Bigotry, racism, hate, xenophobia, nationalism, greed, spite, cruelty, fascism. Ignorance upon ignorance, of all the devil’s many kinds.

But the really strange, bizarre, and weird thing isn’t all that — ignorance has always been around, hasn’t it? It’s that today, ignorance is willful. Deliberate. Proud. Boastful, cocky, and exultant. Pompous, high-sounding, and aggrandizing. It waves banners and sings chants and discusses philosophies. Ignorance today thinks of itself as Aristotle by way of Descartes and Kant. The really strange thing about now is that ignorance parades itself as enlightenment.

Ignorance — of every kind, day after day. That’s bad enough. But ignorance proudly presenting itself as wisdom, truth, and enlightenment? In bestsellers, through YouTube “personalities”, by college professors? Now that’s tragedy and comedy both. And yet people buy it. Why? I think this weird phenomenon — of flaunting ignorance as grand-sounding enlightenment — is made of a fatal cocktail of cognitive dissonance, infantile regression, and malignant narcissism.

<<snip>>

[spanone]

1. K&R

[Laelth]

2. It's a function of the SUCCESS of democratic ideals, mainly.

1 person = 1 vote; my insanity = your reality.

I don’t deny that malignant narcissism plays a key role, however.

-Laelth

[dlk]

3. This is a twist on traditional American anti-intellectualism

It’s the “I’m ignorant and proud of it” contingent.

[Dustlawyer]

4. Anytime a mention of the quarantine protestors is made, we must point out that these

are the fools being taken advantage of by the powerful business interests that are using the leverage of their campaign donations to open up too early.

This demonstrates the power of the plutocrats over our government. A power they have because we allow legalized bribery of our politicians. We will never fix most of our countries problems, wealth inequality, climate change, health care, equal rights..., until we reform how we elect our leaders. As we have seen clearly now, our politicians only represent Donors, not average Americans!

[Laelth]

5. I disagree, in part.

Yes. The protesters in question are fools. Yes. They are being used, but it’s not by plutocrats. It’s by the Republican Party.

Business owners DON’T WANT to reopen right now. There aren’t enough patrons to justify reopening. If they wanted to reopen, they would. They don’t want to yet. People are staying at home ... not because of stay-at-home orders but because they don’t want to die.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, desperately wants the economy to improve (even though they are clueless about how to MAKE it improve). Honestly, there’s little to nothing that they can do, so they’re shifting blame, and that’s precisely what these protests that they are fomenting are designed to do. They want to blame China, Obama, the WHO, Democratic governors, or Democrats, in general, for the collapse of the economy. That’s about all that they hope these protests will accomplish.

Sadly, it might work.

-Laelth

[Dustlawyer]

6. I think we are close in our opinions. However, the big oil companies and other similiar big

businesses, including Wall Street, want us open now. That is why idiots like Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick spout the BS they have. There is a lot of pressure for the governors to open up. The Republicans would like the economy to improve to help their chances in November, but they are being pushed by business as well but run the risk of having to shut down again due to a resurgence of the virus.

While not all businesses are so irresponsible, the really big ones do not care as long as they can start making money again. That CEO has to meet some internal profit level to get his/her bonus and they generally do not care what happens to make it happen.

I think we agree that there are two drivers of this "open up" movement. The election and corporate profits.

I do not wish for a second wave but I believe it will happen because of this shortsighted behavior. We do not do long term thinking well in this country anymore.

[Laelth]

7. Sure.

The oil companies want the economy “open,”
but if nobody’s buying oil, nobody’s buying oil, and there’s nothing that Republicans (or anyone else) can do about that. Eliminating stay-at-home orders (the alleged goal of these protesters) will accomplish NOTHING (except for blame-shifting, and that, I think, is the ultimate goal of these protests).

-Laelth