Sunday, June 8, 2008
Stupidity Worship -- A Guide to the Perplexed
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Tuesday
April 17, 2007
STUPIDITY WORSHIP -- A GUIDE TO THE PERPLEXED
Dear Sister Pamela Sue,
I say this in the spirit of solidarity. And while I know that you know that I know that you know this already, there are those who'll take wrong anything they can get away with taking wrong. It is about them that I shall speak, them and their ilk.
Nothing new there, so nothing new here -- only what bears repeating for as long as there's breath in this tired old body. Nothing that Sinclair Lewis didn't say already in BABBITT or Philip Roth in THE HUMAN STAIN or, more recently, in THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA.
And that is that STUPIDITY WORSHIP is alive and well in America today and moving among us like some malevolent spirit. As you already know, my impulsion to give voice to this unpleasant fact is born largely out of our hundreds of phone messages to one another, you and I, over the past 4 or 5 or 6 years -- or whatever it's been. Please know that I come not to anatomize stupidity worship but merely to meditate upon it. To at least define it, however, would look a lot like the standard definition of the Stockholm Syndrome of which I was speaking not long ago; for both functionally resemble what's been referred to in recent decades by clinicians as "the cycle of abuse."
But to leave off from anatomizing to return to our meditating: Stupidity Worship might reasonably be classified among the more widespread psychopathologies of our time. Insofaras this be the case, dare we hope against hope for a cure within our lifetime?
Probably not. For History teaches that stupidity worship actually has become hard-wired -- not so much into our brains as into our culture, into the conspiracy to commit fraud that's abroad in our global village.
With the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Scientific (ergo: democratic) threats to that mythocratic feudalism with which the various oligarchies and their overly comfortable kin had heretofore enslaved the bodies and minds of our peasant ancestors, stupidity worship has bodied forth out of thin air, as what we might euphemistically refer to as a "social control device." Thus might ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM and Stupidity Worship be no more or less than the two sides of the same coin.
Which turns out to be only one of several reasons why this particular "coin" is of special interest to folks like you and me -- and anyone else who cares to care about the future of human happiness on Planet Earth. Truth liberates. Stupidity enslaves. Slavery bad; democracy good.
Contrary to popular belief, Capitalism is as incompatible with democracy (and therefore with truth) as was that discredited 20th century fascist horror misnamed "Communism." Neither of these false constructs, either inside or outside of the false dichotomy where the mythmakers had misplaced them, could have lasted an hour in the sunshine and open air without the presence of Stupidity Worship.
And that, in a nutshell, is why I'd just as soon pull the covers up over my head and sleep till noon, rather than subject myself to the slings and arrows of outrageous Stupidity Worship, which seems to have been dumped in the drinking water, all over the planet. Which is why, if I win the lottery this week, I'm sailing away to some place where Stupidity Worship isn't practiced. To some place where Clearmindedness is still respected -- or, at the very least, is not illegal, taboo, reviled, and heretical. I've already begun to collect travel brochures and to shop on line for first-class tickets.
YOUR BROTHER IN CLEARMINDEDNESS,
Galen
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Tuesday
April 17, 2007
STUPIDITY WORSHIP -- A GUIDE TO THE PERPLEXED
Dear Sister Pamela Sue,
I say this in the spirit of solidarity. And while I know that you know that I know that you know this already, there are those who'll take wrong anything they can get away with taking wrong. It is about them that I shall speak, them and their ilk.
Nothing new there, so nothing new here -- only what bears repeating for as long as there's breath in this tired old body. Nothing that Sinclair Lewis didn't say already in BABBITT or Philip Roth in THE HUMAN STAIN or, more recently, in THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA.
And that is that STUPIDITY WORSHIP is alive and well in America today and moving among us like some malevolent spirit. As you already know, my impulsion to give voice to this unpleasant fact is born largely out of our hundreds of phone messages to one another, you and I, over the past 4 or 5 or 6 years -- or whatever it's been. Please know that I come not to anatomize stupidity worship but merely to meditate upon it. To at least define it, however, would look a lot like the standard definition of the Stockholm Syndrome of which I was speaking not long ago; for both functionally resemble what's been referred to in recent decades by clinicians as "the cycle of abuse."
But to leave off from anatomizing to return to our meditating: Stupidity Worship might reasonably be classified among the more widespread psychopathologies of our time. Insofaras this be the case, dare we hope against hope for a cure within our lifetime?
Probably not. For History teaches that stupidity worship actually has become hard-wired -- not so much into our brains as into our culture, into the conspiracy to commit fraud that's abroad in our global village.
With the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Scientific (ergo: democratic) threats to that mythocratic feudalism with which the various oligarchies and their overly comfortable kin had heretofore enslaved the bodies and minds of our peasant ancestors, stupidity worship has bodied forth out of thin air, as what we might euphemistically refer to as a "social control device." Thus might ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM and Stupidity Worship be no more or less than the two sides of the same coin.
Which turns out to be only one of several reasons why this particular "coin" is of special interest to folks like you and me -- and anyone else who cares to care about the future of human happiness on Planet Earth. Truth liberates. Stupidity enslaves. Slavery bad; democracy good.
Contrary to popular belief, Capitalism is as incompatible with democracy (and therefore with truth) as was that discredited 20th century fascist horror misnamed "Communism." Neither of these false constructs, either inside or outside of the false dichotomy where the mythmakers had misplaced them, could have lasted an hour in the sunshine and open air without the presence of Stupidity Worship.
And that, in a nutshell, is why I'd just as soon pull the covers up over my head and sleep till noon, rather than subject myself to the slings and arrows of outrageous Stupidity Worship, which seems to have been dumped in the drinking water, all over the planet. Which is why, if I win the lottery this week, I'm sailing away to some place where Stupidity Worship isn't practiced. To some place where Clearmindedness is still respected -- or, at the very least, is not illegal, taboo, reviled, and heretical. I've already begun to collect travel brochures and to shop on line for first-class tickets.
YOUR BROTHER IN CLEARMINDEDNESS,
Galen
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Friday, May 16, 2008
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