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The Year In Review

IndymacBank -- Depression Era Bank Runs in 21st Century America

The reasons we are an ignorant nation are complex, but at their core is a national passion for being anti-intellectual. We don’t study history with the same zeal as prior generations so we don’t know what problems were experienced, or what is to be learned from how they were solved. Nor do we follow how politicians and office holders are running our country as fully and carefully as our parents and grandparents. What is it about being ignorant of the things that matter most in our lives that brought us here?

Robert Butche

The American Nation

Published: February 18, 2009
By Robert Butche

Unclear Notions Of Culpability

Public ignorance about the so-called world economy afflicts each of the Big Seven nations. Nowhere has the demise of failed international finance been more damaging than the United States and Britain. The impact of Wall Street failures, market collapses and titans of international banking has only begun to be felt. While no one knows what will be the full extent of damage, or how long it might take to turn the tide, we already know there is far more afoot than economic damage.

The collapsing house of cards resulting from over 20 years of debt-driving binging has far more dimensions than jobs, savings and wealth. There are immense social implications, confounding political dislocations and an unfolding disbelief solidifying as distrust in everything and everyone tainted by proximity to what are at best unclear notions of culpability. Unraveling of trust in government, finance, politics world-wide in scope, is a predictable if unpleasant reality arising from ignorance about the things that matter most.

What We Don’t Know Matters

Ignorance is an outcome flowing from lack of intellectual curiosity, cultural disconnect, abject laziness, or maniacal self-absorption. It’s a human failing that has been especially contagious in most Western cultures.

Stupidity is an accident of genetics. Being stupid or ignorant are equal opportunity oppressors — shortcomings that can easily get one killed, cause immense economic dislocation, lead to war, or forever lose our cherished freedoms.

The reasons we are an ignorant nation are complex, but at their core is an abiding distrust of anything intellectual, historical, logical, or discovered before last week. As a bloc, the powerful western nations appear to have turned away from reality. We embrace easy wealth, immediate gratification, and debt even as we hold in contempt mankind’s enduring values:  hard work, responsibility and anything suspected of having intellectual merit.

The widespread sublimation of citizen engagement here in the United States underscores growing public apathy — and what some describe a nation absent a historical compass. Perhaps this explains why we no longer study and value history with the same zeal as prior generations.

Nor do we fully understand how politicians and office holders are running our country. Our ignorance makes us prey to political polarization by a savvy and well informed Political Class. Being ignorant of the things that matter most in our lives has brought us to the verge of international financial collapse.

Too Busy For Freedom To Survive

Being a free citizen in a nation of sovereign citizens requires that we be ever vigilant and well informed. To the degree that we collectively fail to do so, we become part of the problem by simply being ignorant or uncaring or both. We are not an ignorant people. We are better educated than previous generations. But how, and in what we’re educated, has not served us well in the last generation. We know great things — especially the technicalities of immensely complex and largely abstract fields.

Many Know More About Sports Than Freedom

Most Americans are in fact highly educated, well intentioned, generous to a fault. We know a great deal about music, sports, our jobs, the stock market and gossip. We also know how to garner wealth for ourselves but little about how to create it for others. We know little of the cost of freedom unless someone we love has paid the ultimate price so that we can take life easy and avoid carrying any of the immense load required of a free citizenry.

We’re complicated — being lazy and self centered as well as hard working and complacent. Our nation has produced legions of college-educated specialists who understand every nuance of profit optimization, or engineering, or finance, or law, but little or nothing of history, social cohesion, honesty, integrity, or ethics. As a nation, we are masters of how things work, but immensely ignorant about which things matter. That’s ignorant, plain and simple.

There are many causes for our limited knowledge of what matters most in our lives. The reality that there are people who knowingly and intentionally misdirect our attention is perhaps the most alarming. Broadcasting, the single most powerful media for most of our adult lives, has systematically misdirected what we know about ourselves as a people and a nation. Television teaches more children more effectively and for more hours than our schools. The message is disrespect for anything intellectual, ethical, responsible or cultural.

Television — America’s Favorite National Sewer

In its ongoing descent into becoming our national sewer of information and entertainment, television has been the single most destructive force in American life. Entertainment, no matter how sordid, distorted, or anti-social is prized for its income generating. News and information are no longer important. Just as Norman Lear has been telling us for the last quarter century, entertainment values have subsumed American life and culture.

One result has been to conflate what’s news and what’s entertainment. On television, all programming, including news, is dramatized, packaged, formatted and made hostage to entertainment values. Television news, whether network, local, or cable is presented for its audience-attracting qualities. Important ideas, values and culture are distorted or ignored in favor of what’s fun, interesting, trendy, funny or sexually suggestive.

The disaster now unfolding in our our lives is a stark reminder that reality cannot be ignored, responsibility cannot be abdicated, and that each of us is accountable for what we have done to ourselves.