Doubling Down on Idiot America »
Posted By chuck-the-canuck 7 months, 2 weeks ago in NewsThe rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's
not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that
Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years
ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot
America today represents -- for profit mainly, but also, and more
cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power -- the
breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It
also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what
they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian,
or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert,
then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where
everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert .
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chuck-the-canuck
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Hunter S. Thompson
"By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch ...
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