Even More Good News About The News
Everyone should check out the latest Harris Poll, just in case you were worried that America might at least be starting to grasp the basic facts of the matter.
What really astounds me is how certain untruths continue to gain support the longer major news organizations explain that these things aren't true. I think any ambiguities that Fox News might have been held responsible for as regards the Iraq/9-11 connection have been more than countered by now, and yet the figures of people who WANT TO BELIEVE keeps climbing.
Fred Clark, over at my fave Slacktivist suggests that, "Polls like this one serve as a kind of report card for those of us in the news biz. How well we are doing our job can be gauged with both positive and negative measures of what the public knows." Fred may have a point, but I think he might be giving the media too much credit. Other factors necessarily come into play when trying to explain overt social retardation on this scale, factors like alcoholism or lead poisoning.
I may have mentioned this in brief before around here, but it has long been my contention that certain notions are simply outside the grasp of the majority of modern man. I first really began to think about this when, after a series of discussions, I came to realize that most evolution supporters don't really understand how evolution works. As a result, when hit with some of the more devious and well crafted creationist apologetics, they were left at a loss. But it's not like we all don't pretty much get a fair rundown on evolution in high school, and most people should have gathered at least a smidge more in college. So why is it that, for the most part, most of the masses on either side of the issue really share about the same level of understanding?
I have grudgingly concluded that as an idea becomes more complex, fewer and fewer people have what it takes to ever really solidly grasp that idea. Calculus. Most people can, given the time and training, grasp calculus, at least well enough to ultilize it, if not so well as to advance it. Evolution, probably a little over half the human population can really 'get' this idea in all its complexities, as in comprehend it beyond the layman's, "mutations occur, things change," step by step. Relativity. Probably only a quarter of humanity is ready to really grasp what relatively relies on, or what rules it establishes, even at a layman's level, and a fraction of that could ever grasp it down to the finer mathematics.
And what I mean by this is that you could take the bottom half of humanity, and no amount of teaching, attention, resources, drug therapy, etc. is ever going to get them to truly comprehend relativity. At best, they might be able to repeat the formula from memory. It's simply an idea that really is beyond what their minds are capable of consciously incorporating.
And maybe there are stages of political thought that suffer this same bottleneck. Complexities, disinformation and kneejerk morality pile up until the overall detail of the world exceeds the 'maximum active memory' of many people. In the same way they simply can't see fourteen moves ahead on a chess board, and never will, so too can they not retain the compexities and facts of the world stage. As a result, to make sense of why we attacked Iraq after 9-11, they can only make the shortest connection available, which is that Iraq attacked us first. And you can show them otherwise, but their minds have no place for the new information. It doesn't make sense to them, because the facts that are needed for them to be able to include and incorporate that new information, namely that Bush is a liar, that governments are corrupt, that politicians are more interested in placating the populace than in the truth, that the G.O.P., based on its relationship to big businesses, had ulteior motives for wanting to invade, and on and on and on, exceed their 'usage'.
Simply put, we have to wonder if, and to what degree if this is the case, humanity may be 'terminally' stupid.
In the meantime, I think it's important that every Fun Party member keep in mind that we have nothing against stupid people. What's important is that they have fun, and the end goal of this train of reasoning would be, naturally, that if there are many people out there simply incapable of realizing the state of their world intelligently, then we must figure out how to tailor our platform for them. Perhaps we simply lift the responsibility of social stress from their shoulders so that they can have more fun. Or, maybe, we create a fake social stage for them to play on, rather like a Fisher Price child's steering wheel. Let's be the first political party to have a customizable platform, so that we can best suit the wants and needs of all the members of society who fall under our sway, whatever their personal failings may be.
