Reply #17: education as deception

[ulTRAX]

VioletLake wrote: "Deception is best fought with education, not laws."

Education is hardly a panacea. Usually education is the root of the problem because it's nothing more than blatant indoctrination... a time we are infused with our nation's ideology which limits thought to a narrow range rather than expands it. For example we're bought up to validate the Constitution, despite its obvious flaws... not to critique it with an eye toward improvement. The ideological system then becomes self-justifying and self-perpetuating. The result, there's a great deal of Founder worship in the US that has all the trappings of a secular religion.

Another example, how many do you know on the "left" who wrap themselves in the mantle of "democracy" because they value it more as a self-description as opposed to actually trying to define what it means?

I believe the way to counter the inertia of mindlessness at least on the individual level is to get the discussion back to basic values and let people begin to discover the contradictions they've spent a lifetime papering over. Engineering a paradigm shift on the societal level will be more difficult.