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Feb. 8, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

18:02

1578 True News: Public Miseducation and the Shame of History - Freedomain Radio

Why it is sooo insane for pundits to argue that Obama is having a hard time getting things done because the electorate is sooo dumb! :(

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Moly from Free Domain Radio.
	It's been a little while since I've coated your monitor with a fine foam of spittlefest, so let's get started, shall we?
	A story has been making the rounds in the mainstream media that the reason you see that Barack Obama is having such a tough time getting things done is because the American public is just...
	Functionally retarded. So let's have a look at this article from Slate.
	It says, in trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons, including Obama's tactical missteps, obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship, in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable news stations, the Senate filibuster, blah, blah, blah.
	These are all large factors, the article says, to be sure.
	But that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in the current predicament.
	The childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.
	Anybody who says you can't have it both ways has clearly not been spending much time reading opinion polls lately.
	One year ago, 59%.
	The American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup.
	A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it.
	There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something more troubling, a country that simultaneously demands and rejects Action on unemployment, deficits, healthcare, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems.
	60% of US citizens want stricter regulations of financial institutions, but nearly the same proportion say we're suffering from too much regulation in business.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	We want our government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes.
	We dislike government in the abstract.
	According to CNN, 67% of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness.
	But we love government in the particular.
	Even large majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them.
	Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it.
	But 80 or more percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and spend more money on roads and bridges, which is of course stimulus spending.
	So, here's the summation of the article.
	It says, Oh, the tasty madness of modern thinking.
	And I can barely even call it Thinking.
	So let's have another look at a few statistics with regards to U.S. credulity.
	So three questions have been put since 1982, and the most recent was done in 2004.
	The links for all of this will be to the right.
	So God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.
	In 1982, 44% of people agreed with that.
	In 2004, 45% agreed with that.
	Completely mad statement.
	Or, man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God has guided the progress, this process, including man's creation.
	And in 1982, 38% of people believed that.
	Still a very insane statement.
	In 2004, 38% hadn't changed.
	There was a slight advance in man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.
	God had no part of this process.
	It did increase from 9% to 13% from 82 to 2004.
	Americans. 34% of Americans say they believe in ghosts.
	The same proportion believe in unidentified flying objects.
	19% accept the existence of spells or witchcraft.
	Almost half of Americans believe in extrasensory perception or ESP. I guess they're getting this through dreams.
	And you think it's about conservatives versus liberals?
	31% of liberals say they have seen a ghost.
	And 18% of conservatives.
	14% mostly men and lower income people say they've seen a UFO. Those who believe in ESP are more likely to be better educated and white.
	51% of college graduates believe in ESP compared to 37% with a high school diploma or less.
	37% of Americans believe that houses can be haunted.
	32% of Americans believe that ghosts or the spirits of dead people can come back in certain places or situations.
	26% of Americans...
	I mean, this sounds low, but this is one in four, right?
	Believe in clairvoyance or the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future.
	25% believe in astrology, that the position of stars and planets can affect people's lives.
	Over 20% believe that people can communicate mentally with someone who has died.
	21% believe in witches.
	20% believe in reincarnation.
	And 9% believe in channeling or allowing a spirit being to temporarily assume control of the body.
	Um... In 2000, a reality check, a public agenda survey, found that only 39% of employers thought that having a high school diploma meant that the student had at least learned the basics of math and spelling and grammar.
	College professors do not think very highly of the mathematics proficiency of most of their students who are coming in from high school.
	Only about 40% possess at least a basic knowledge of mathematics.
	All others fall short. When it comes to writing clearly and using proper grammar and spelling, Only about 20% of students are perceived to have these skills.
	This mirrors a 2002 survey of high school teachers in which only 20% said that students in their schools learn to speak and write well.
	One possible cause for this perceived shortcoming in mathematics and reading proficiency could be that schools of education don't stress these skills.
	A survey by Public Agenda found that only 19% of educational professors said that it was quote, absolutely essential to produce teachers who quote, stress correct grammar, spelling and punctuation for their students.
	Anyway, I'll put the links of these to the right, but let's throw aside these statistics and talk about the facts.
	I have done a search, and perhaps I've missed it.
	Of course, the Internet is a wide and tumbleweed-drifted place, but I have done a search on any of the writers who've talked about the ignorance of the retarded voters that is causing the paralysis in Washington.
	I have not seen one who even remotely touches on the fact that the same government that is supposed to be paralyzed by the idiocy of the voters is entirely responsible for educating them.
	You know, sometimes it feels like when you stand up against the gale force of the willful ignorance of the supposedly educated literati, that it's like being in one of those wind tunnels, you know, where your cheeks flap and your face goes back because it is just a brain fart of tsunami and hurricane-like proportions to stand before.
	The government is entirely responsible for educating the vast majority of the population.
	And the fact that it produces graduates at the high school level who only 20% have decent literary skills, let alone reasoning skills, you couldn't even put a survey in reasoning skills with regards to high school graduates because they wouldn't even understand what the word means.
	So to blame the citizens for their ignorance and irrationality Rather than the government for failing to educate, or rather counter-educating them, is to me, I mean, that just takes an act of self-blindness that is truly biblical in its stature and power.
	Think about the amount of time that you spent in high school.
	13 years, 14 years, 12 years, whatever it was.
	Try and remember what you learned in school.
	I don't mean the stuff that you learned outside of school in conversations on the internet, in private studying, hobbies, or whatever.
	What you actually learned in school.
	For me, it's just a dim, dismal, boring fog of fear and stultifying monotony.
	And I remember learning a whole bunch of propagandistic bullshit about how great Lincoln was, the great fascist, and how great government was and how government saved us from the Great Depression and won the Second World War and beat the Nazis and all this sort of stuff, right? I mean, whether you come from...
	I was educated in England and Canada, but we learned all of these same American myths just translated to our local culture.
	What did we not learn?
	Did you ever take a basic course on logic?
	If children were taught basic logic, and they really don't need to be taught it because they're very logical to begin with, but if it was simply formalized into basic logic, What would happen?
	Well, the number of people who believe in witchcraft and nonsense like ESP and psychic powers and clairvoyance and ghosts and...
	I mean, it's embarrassing.
	It's embarrassing that 400 years after the scientific revolution, we still have people believing.
	The ass farts from idiots' brains never took a basic course on logic.
	Most of what is discussed in the mainstream media is economics, right?
	Certainly most of what is voted on are various economic policies.
	I mean, the healthcare debate all comes down to, fundamentally, it comes down to economics, and you really can't understand any of these things without a basic...
	Knowledge of economics.
	I don't even mean Austrian versus Keynesian versus the Chicago school.
	I mean just basic economics.
	All supplies are limited.
	All desires are unlimited. The basic reason for economics.
	People respond to incentives.
	The supply and demand curve.
	Just the basics that every economist believes on.
	The fact that free trade is required for an increase in wealth and that protectionism destroys wealth.
	Any of these basic things, which all intelligent economists believe in, Was it ever taught to you?
	Of course not! Of course not!
	Right? What about in a society where ignorance of the law is no excuse, were you taught anything about law?
	No, you were taught how a bill becomes a law and the schoolhouse rock and all, and maybe you saw that on TV. But no, you weren't taught about the laws of your country.
	You didn't go through a detailed list of the laws that apply to you.
	Why? Because it would be completely impossible.
	Because about a trillion laws apply to you, which are ever shifting, and the whole purpose, of course, is to make you constantly uneasy that you're breaking some damn law or another, particularly in the tax code.
	So if a teacher said, ignorance of the law is no excuse, and I'm going to teach you about the laws that apply to you...
	People would very quickly realize that it was a completely ridiculous system.
	So they can't teach you that. Why can't they teach children logic?
	Because the parents, particularly the religious or superstitious parents, would get offended if the children came home with some ability to think in a scientific and rational manner.
	It would be highly offensive to the parents who want to drag them off to superstitious churches and so on.
	So you're not taught about any of that.
	You're not taught, of course, you're not taught any philosophy, and the reason you're not taught any philosophy is that brings up significant questions of ethics, which are not good for the government.
	So, basically, you're just penned up and kept in a soup of boredom and ignorance, so that you're easier to rule when you get out.
	And then, to say then, as a commentator who has...
	Any brains at all, and, you know, two eyes to even blink open and look at the world in any clarity, to say that the government is suffering from the ignorance of its citizens is such a vast acquits way to look at things that this man must be staring up his own rectum with his head all the way up.
	You know, he blinks and it tickles his tummy.
	That's all I can think about, because to look at it from that perspective is completely, completely, completely mad.
	And it's a special kind of madness to blame the victims of government education.
	Now, what about the 20% of children who can read and think and do some math?
	Well, I guarantee you that is not coming from the school system.
	That is coming from more educated parents at home, more educated, more involved parents at home.
	It's like the kids who go into the whole word learning.
	They end up with learning disabilities almost exclusively when you memorize the whole word, like doctor and dinosaur.
	You don't understand the basics of the language so that you can assemble your own words through looking at the letters.
	Well, some kids go into that system and end up with learning disabilities, and some don't, and the ones that don't are the ones whose parents teach them how to read properly at home, right?
	So, this is the amazing thing, and I'll keep this one relatively brief, but this is really the amazing thing.
	Before public education, before state-run, fascistic, communist education was inflicted upon the citizenry against their will throughout the Western world in the 19th century, literacy rates, at least in America, were over 90%.
	Over 90%! And this is a culture that absorbed very complex works, like de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and read Thomas Paine, and read John Locke, and read Adam Smith, and this was all in the general population, highly literate, highly intelligent.
	Highly verbal, highly skilled, highly entrepreneurial, self-starters.
	When public education came in, it just nuked all of that.
	And it took a couple of generations, as it always does, because you still had quality teachers who were recruited from the private sector to teach in the public schools.
	It took about 100 years for the final nail in the coffin to go into the public school system, which was in the late 60s and early 70s.
	It became impossible, functionally impossible to fire teachers.
	And then, of course, the whole quality of the system collapsed.
	And now it's just a holding pen for the breeding of criminals and underskilled criminals.
	It's a class-inflicted idiocracy.
	The ruling classes don't want the poor to be well-educated, obviously.
	Not only politically, because that makes them easier to rule and to promise them contradictory things like, we'll spend money on you, but we won't raise your taxes.
	Because they haven't been taught logic.
	Or economics, where you say, come on, pull the other one.
	That's impossible. Give me a break, right?
	So, the fact that you can be made idiot contradictory promises is much easier for the rulers.
	But economically, it's also very important that the poor are kept ignorant.
	Why? Because the poor underbid the rich.
	The poor underbid the rich.
	So, if you educated the poor very well, then the poor would compete with the rich for managerial and upper-class positions, and they would underbid them, because They'd be happy to be paid less because it would be a lot more than where they were coming from.
	So when you have a sort of superior elite within society, they are heavily invested politically and economically in keeping the poorer classes as retarded and dependent upon the state as humanly possible so that they don't face competition when it comes to the top-level jobs.
	The last thing that I'll say, and I'm going to do a series on this shortly, is that It's all about ex post facto reasoning when you start to debate these kinds of questions like public school and so on with people.
	Why do we have a public school? Well, people just make this assumption, which is completely the opposite of what actually happened.
	The assumption is there was a problem called a lack of education.
	Society as a whole got together and put together these public schools to solve the problem of a lack of education.
	And therefore, the implicit premise of why we're always taught this nonsense is that It is then believed that if we get rid of public education, which was created to solve the problem of ignorance and lack of education, particularly for the poor, if we get rid of public education, we will have a recurrence of the problem it was designed to solve.
	Government programs become like insulin for a diabetic.
	If I start taking my insulin, then I get a return of diabetic symptoms.
	I lose my foot and join Ella Fitzgerald in a wheelchair.
	This is the complete opposite of the truth.
	This is the complete opposite of the truth.
	And you just have to look into the history of public schools and you can check out Brett Burnett's excellent School Sucks podcast for an accurate history of this.
	Don't take my word for it. Don't even take his word for it if you don't want, but go to the sources.
	But public education was imposed as a means of social control, of dumbing down the masses, of controlling the influx of foreigners and culturalizing them to the dominant ideology of the ruling classes.
	And it has nothing to do with solving the problem of education.
	Well, actually, it does.
	It has to do with solving the problem of too much education.
	Because when the poor are well-educated and can actually think for themselves, then they're much more difficult to rule.
	They become like cows that can get over the fence.
	Nope.
	Can't be having that.
	And this is just one of these things that the mainstream media simply won't talk about.
	It will not talk about the mass catastrophe and disasters of the public education system.
	And, you know, the scene in Pink Floyd's The Wall, where the children are falling into a sausage machine and coming out as little strands of meaty goo, that is what happens to the glorious and glowing brains of the lower classes, which, if they were allowed to shine in their incandescent glory, would completely eclipse the pale fires of the ruling classes.

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