“how does a Yale graduate not know the difference”
Knowing and knowledge is not the crisis. The crisis of understanding in the United States of America 2025 is that thinking systems are important. Reactionary thinking, mockery thinking, one-upmanship thinking is not the same as the science way of thinking. Twitter-thinking, meme thinking, isn’t the same as science thinking.
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less)” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995
We, The United States of America, have been and we don’t even realize how we got fucked, who did the fucking, and how we have entirely failed to defend or study the problem. We are so lost in our own Total Mockery and Twitter-thinking values, we haven’t a clue about what was unleashed upon the World Wide Web Internet since March 2013.
“We Are here” / “You Are Here” Untied States of America:
We are here:
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951