Why should I feel so alone in my knowledge? Is it a fringe belief system that hinges on delusions and conspiracy theories? No, while I find some of those entertaining, they are mere fodder for distraction that needs to remain where they emerged from: on the fringe.

On the contrary, I’m in love with history, philosophy, and sociology, the glue of culture. From out of the sciences we learn of the building blocks of the very nature of the universe to the emergent organic beings we are.

Meshed together, we form a society that is disparate and grossly unequal. Our shared existence is fracturing as we seem intent on stratifying those who might vaguely understand things from those who are oblivious though self-righteousness while they falsely believe they are the true holders of knowledge.

Those who claim the power of knowledge but are relying on politics to sway a corruptible underclass into becoming their mob are betraying the very values that are supposed to be indicative of their intellect: professional education and proclaimed religious affiliation.

We are not lifting up the masses; we are merely making their poverty comfortable. Poverty is not only about the goods or capital one possesses or fails to attain, but it is also about the intellectual tools that help form decision-making rigor, which leads to better life choices.

I cannot claim to have a professional university education; I dropped out of high school. I cannot be certain that drug use hasn’t fogged my perception. So, what knowledge I might have can easily be dismissed as a perfunctory superficial education that was acquired willy-nilly. All the same, I have to scratch my head in disbelief at what we, as a citizenry allow to pass as being credible from our leadership and even from one another.

Basic logic is lost in hyperbole and an attention span dictated by threes. Some thirty years ago, my idea was as follows: large issues could remain in the public’s mind for upwards of three months, such as political issues, serial killers, and freedom movements such as apartheid. The next block was three-day attention, and it pertained to movies, sports, and larger local issues. Finally, there was the three-hour attention that might see people talking about a TV show, a celebrity drama, or a local sporting event at the high school.

Today, I have to revise this to three hours, three minutes, and three seconds. While it could be argued that a relatively recent event, such as the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, spent more than three hours in the news cycle, I’m suggesting that the majority of people didn’t spend even three hours in consideration of or contemplating the impact of the process that was unfolding. On the contrary, I’d suggest that the average person only needed three seconds to make up their mind. There doesn’t seem to be much of anything that can raise the ire of a person enough to get them engaged for more than about a few minutes.

There’s an inherent problem here in that none of us will ever know anything of any value if we can only ever afford three seconds of decision-making after three minutes of information gathering. We cannot learn languages in three minutes, three hours, three days, or even three weeks. To that end, we are collectively being manipulated by broadcast and social media-driven political establishments that are able to distract the uneducated with a superfluous dusting of titillating fragments that delude their adherents into believing they are well-informed.

Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, Marshall McLuhan in The Medium is the Message, and Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death all foresaw the dangers of our passivity but were powerless to curb a population bent on self-destruction and having already turned away from the written word. Now, amplify their prognostications by taking the internet and reducing the dialog to six-second videos found in what became known as vines and speech that is reduced to a tweet, and the recipe for stupefaction is well in place.

Let’s return to my opening statement: why do I feel so alone in my knowledge? At any given moment in my day, I cannot be surrounded by people who care or are able to consider ideas that their intransigence isn’t able to engage. Their memes, which have become their mentors, fit nicely for a minute or two and only work to reinforce their sense of certainty that plays to their continued ignorance, masquerading as a kind of knowledge but one without depth.

I don’t necessarily see a refuge where I can turn to be in a community that cherishes or at least respects the age of knowledge that is quickly fading if it’s not already dead. Populism easily escalates into nationalism, and this is especially so when able to lob these idiocies on a disenfranchised, poorly educated populace, which is exactly what we’ve cultivated for the past 40 years.

Maybe the better question for myself should be, why have I been cursed with this sense of awareness that impinges on my well-being?