(I'm doing this because I listened to the diatribe earlier this morning, and the ideas rang true, at least mostly... and I imagined how I'd express them myself. But first, a transcription.)
About the time I went to college, everyone starting saying "no doubt."
I mean, people already said "no doubt" and its meaning hadn't changed, or anything, but
for whatever reason, the linguistic tides of style came in in the 90s, and the term "no doubt" floated to the top.
It just became the omni-present affirmation, and of course, soon after that, it was being sold back to us on stickers and shirts and albums, and all that shit.
And I only bring it up because when I look back on the generation that I came of age in, there could have been no better motto: NO DOUBT.
Government's experimenting on dead aliens in New Mexico? No doubt!
Medical industry has heightened (???) the cure for cancer so that they can keep raking in that sweet chemotherapy money? No doubt!
Weed is only illegal because cannabis oil could easily replace our need for petroleum and EXXON won't allow it? No doubt!
Now, that's not to say that we believed EVERYthing, of course. But we just didn't have doubt.
There were plenty of things that we just outright rejected, like the religion of the churches, and everything the government said.
But we didn't DOUBT those things so much as, you know, knew they were wrong intuitively.
Now I don't mean to indict my entire generation here, because I know we weren't all as stupid as me, and the group of hippie rejects I surrounded myself with were by no means a representative sample of people growing up in the 90s,
But I do think that there was like an undercurrent of that same attitude throughout. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the "No Doubt" generation came of age at the same time as the Internet.
I mean, you drop an unprecedented amount of unvetted information on a generation that has virtually no required education in critical thinking, and you wind up with a generation of irrational conspiracy nuts, picking and choosing whatever facts that best fit the narrative they prefer.
And in our defense, on the surface, modern physics is every bit as esoteric as the crazy shit that new-age woo merchants are peddling. Right?
I mean, there are critical differences, sure. But not such that they really stand out to a college sophomore with only a passing interest in science.
All I knew was that there were a couple of competing narratives that all seemed too insane to believe, so I picked the one that offered the highest probability of super-powers.
And all other things being equal, I'd say that was the right choice.
But alas, all other things were NOT equal. And one of those competing narratives could launch robots into space, and the other one couldn't.
So, like a lot of us, but not enough of us, I reluctantly gave up on the super powers, and I gave up on the tarot, and the astral projection, and the karma, and the chacras. And in their place, I substituted DOUBT.
Unfortunately, as we all know, not everybody made it out of the "No Doubt" prison. An awful lot of folks are still staying in there, surrounded by bars of confirmation bias, and credulity, so taken with the architecture of their cell, that they never realized that the doors weren't locked.
And why would they? Right? I mean, the grass on our side of the bars is all brown and mortal and impersonal. And the grass on their side is all green and inviting and lives forever. (That's cause it's astro-turf, of course. But nobody told them, and they don't want to know bad enough to check).
And I certainly don't need to tell you all the terrible consequences of all this. We see stories of parents trying to cure their children with maple syrup and positive thinking, all the fucking time. We see billions of dollars we've pissed down the old med rabbit holes, and at the same time that our real medical facilities are under-funded.
And look, the tools for solving these problems are really simple. Critical thinking isn't some esoteric (applying or appealing to a very small group of people) subject. It's one of the easiest things to teach people. I mean, sure, you throw a lot of folks when you start talking bonus toleds (????) and shit. But just teaching people to know what TRUE looks like is as easy as it is important. And yet, as a matter of course, we don't do it.
Now I can't speak for any of the other countries, but in the USA, there are ZERO requirements in public education for epistemology.
("the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation into what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.")
Consider that for a second. All the learning you will ever do will rely on your mastery of epistemology, and yet we virtually ignore that subject in school. It would be like a basketball team that never actually uses a ball in practice. They just watch videos and look at chalkboards, and then we send them out on the court hoping they can figure out dribbling and passing before half-time.
I mean, look, I'm not saying that a few classes on critical thinking would guarantee that all students come out of school immune to charlatans and bullshit. You make all the kids learn math, and a ton of them still play the lottery. But it would certainly help.
So why WON'T we do it?
Well, I bet you've already guessed my answer, haven't you?
This fucking country can't handle EVOLUTION. What do you think American parents would do if we started teaching school kids how to distinguish reality from fiction?
I mean, think about it. Think about evolution. Now, that only disproves some aspects of some denominations of some religions, right? The majority of the people in this country DO accept the facts of evolution. But the opposition is loud enough to shout down all the reasonable people.
But teaching children critical thinking - that takes down ALL the religious claims, right? Teaching children to think correctly would immunize all of the dumbest of them against religious indoctrination.
I mean, maybe they could still justify one of those liberal pseudo-faiths that tries to fit into the negative spaces of sound epistemology, one of those denominations that hid God in one of the six cracks science still left for him, or whatever.
But the vast majority of religious denominations in this country would whither and die if their congregants knew the difference between causation and correlation.
And obviously, these religious leaders know that, right. And they couldn't recognize the threat that evolution poses withOUT knowing it.
And unless you've heard pastors preach about how (the book of) Timothy was a forgery, I think we can all agree that they're not above trying to restrict knowledge to defend their bullshit.
So we, as a society, have capitulated to ignorance. The boundary on compulsory education is precisely an amount you would need to know to outwit God.
And if a baby has to die from syrup-ceuticals now and again to keep it that way, apparently that's a price that we're willing to pay.
