Courses like rhetoric, forensics, civics were once crucial in developing critical-thinking skills in school, but have largely vanished. Two generations later, the effect is clear – and discouraging.
Nice piece. You are right about the absence of certain classes in our education system leaving many unprepared to live in a democracy where it is up to the people to have enough critical thinking skills to actually elect the right representatives to govern. Now whether that was intentional or the product of an all but inevitable decline after the baby boom generation? That's a discussion.
I've been thinking quite a bit about collectivist versus individualist societies. America used to be an individualist society. The "rights" of the whole were very limited next to the rights of the one. The real problem with collectivist societies is that they are easy to control and easy to exploit. In that vein, I tend to think that it isn't that the Democrat Party is running the show, but that because the American political left is based more in collectivism, they are easy to exploit. They automatically have a herd mentality to begin with. But the true problem with America at the moment is that the right is also moving toward collectivism, this "we must all get along for the common good" attitude.
Finally, your example of GrubHub is illustrative of a bedrock problem: the tendency to "signal" rather than solve and put illusion above integrity. The company makes money exploiting gig workers. Their basic business model is anathema to a healthy working class, though it's the very predictable end point of the gradual degradation of the rights and influence of our working class. Now whether the CEO is self aware enough to realize this or his lizard brain has the basic instinct to simply survive, he knows he needs to make up for that. So he *signals* his virtue through this dreck about Trump and acceptance and so on. The workers and the people who use GrubHub (who are still the working class) at some level understand how shallow his signaling is, so it comes back to bite him in the behind. That needs to happen more.
Nice piece. You are right about the absence of certain classes in our education system leaving many unprepared to live in a democracy where it is up to the people to have enough critical thinking skills to actually elect the right representatives to govern. Now whether that was intentional or the product of an all but inevitable decline after the baby boom generation? That's a discussion.
I've been thinking quite a bit about collectivist versus individualist societies. America used to be an individualist society. The "rights" of the whole were very limited next to the rights of the one. The real problem with collectivist societies is that they are easy to control and easy to exploit. In that vein, I tend to think that it isn't that the Democrat Party is running the show, but that because the American political left is based more in collectivism, they are easy to exploit. They automatically have a herd mentality to begin with. But the true problem with America at the moment is that the right is also moving toward collectivism, this "we must all get along for the common good" attitude.
Finally, your example of GrubHub is illustrative of a bedrock problem: the tendency to "signal" rather than solve and put illusion above integrity. The company makes money exploiting gig workers. Their basic business model is anathema to a healthy working class, though it's the very predictable end point of the gradual degradation of the rights and influence of our working class. Now whether the CEO is self aware enough to realize this or his lizard brain has the basic instinct to simply survive, he knows he needs to make up for that. So he *signals* his virtue through this dreck about Trump and acceptance and so on. The workers and the people who use GrubHub (who are still the working class) at some level understand how shallow his signaling is, so it comes back to bite him in the behind. That needs to happen more.