John Wise

Polarization, using categorization that amounts to name-calling or as a bludgeoning affront to someone’s intelligence, has become our preferred and maybe most sophisticated current means of engaging in a dialectic.

Just that one sentence is longer than your average tweet and exceeds 85% of the U.S. population’s ability to decipher it.

From our political leadership to many in the popular media, we are pandering to our worst tendencies and apparently have given up on trying to elevate our society. While we ask for increased skills, we are failing to nurture a dialog beyond the utterly inane.

Take this old tweet from our president: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

This missive can be understood by the majority of those considered functionally illiterate as their reading comprehension level is that of a 4^th grader, while my first sentence required 19 years of education (according to various readability tests). This is not an exercise in writing obtusely for the sake of lording my version of complexity over anyone. The larger point is that if you are over 30 years old and are relating to the words of 10-year-olds and cannot comprehend the words of a 55-year-old high school dropout, then maybe the problem is not your perception of me being obtuse or arrogant but that you have neglected the responsibility to yourself.

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?

What are you doing to cultivate your potential? How often do you practice literacy? When was the last time you tried something that wasn’t necessarily physically demanding but had you questioning if your mind was up to the task?

Every day, I ask myself why it appears that so many are comfortable in lazy banalities. What’s wrong with digging into our minds whose currency and lifeblood are words? Our imaginations have become muscles atrophied through the neglect brought by existential angst. Don’t worry about those things outside yourself; dig into the things within that are vast landscapes awaiting your exploration.

Where do you begin such an enormous task? Maybe right there on your smartphone. Go ahead and ask it to tell you about the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory or lookup Burmese Laphet Salad. Stop listening to your favorite songs and tune in to some music you think you hate. Don’t make it easy. Go way out of your comfort zone and try some Merzbow. You could make a commitment to watch an entire Bollywood film that would certainly feature at least half a dozen hit songs, which would give you some idea of the music nearly 2 billion people on earth enjoy.

Other avenues await you, such as recording some video on that phone, installing Adobe’s Creative Cloud of applications on a computer, and learning video editing and storytelling. Or open up Photoshop to learn that tool. Indesign is another one of Adobe’s tools, and with it, you can collect your thoughts and photos and publish your own book.

Video, photography, and writing are not your cup of tea. Grab a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and start watching tutorials on how to make music. Download some free VSTs (instruments and effects) and just playmaking sounds until you develop some skills.

Like drawing or sculpting as a kid? Krita for drawing is free, and Blender offers sculpting as part of their suite of 3D tools and it too is free.

Feel like you already have too much screen time with your connected devices? Turn off the TV and reclaim that time so you can set your attention to productivity tools that actually reflect who you are instead of passively continuing the diet of useless nonsense. Pick up a bunch of knitting needles and make a pair of socks, or buy some clay and sculpt a blob of nothing in particular.

Still not ready for challenging your brain with learning stuff you “think” is too hard? Go to a museum, a concert of music you typically don’t listen to, a play, the opera, or go volunteer at a hospice, halfway house, or other services that help your community.

The thing is that you have to break out of your routine because your routine is potential already realized. You own the repetition of fully knowing how you do the same thing day in and day out; there is no surprise or growth with standing in place. To get somewhere, you must take a step forward. Do not take steps backward or trace the ones you’ve already walked in; where do you think they’ll get you?

In effect, you must walk on the hot coals of discomfort and over the edge of certainty. Only through the continued effort of exploring where you might fail to enjoy the chore or fail to master something will you achieve the skills you need to wear down the calluses of your own stubbornness against change.