My comments below actually are in reference to a different article than the one appearing above. Someone had e-mailed it to me but I could not find the place to comment on it directly. Sorry about that!

Someone sent us the article written by you titled “Forget Red vs. Blue—It’s the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda.” An extremely well written piece making a number of very pertinent and seldom mentioned points.

I’m an eighty-two year old Canadian of Eastern European origins and I’m still troubled by terms such as “educated,” “literate,” “intellectual” vs. the illiterate or barely literate.

Perhaps my confusion springs from by basic belief that both the much vaunted “Intelligence” as well as “Education” are just powerful and potentially deadly forces but nothing else. Not unlike, for instance, another life or death force: electricity. Plug into an electrical outlet a hospital’s life-supporting machine and it will save a child’s life. Plug into the same outlet a penitentiary’s electric chair and it will just as efficiently fry a man. Or perhaps nuclear energy, which could either fuel a spacecraft, sending it into space, light up an entire city, or pulverize one in one blast. Just forces to be controlled and guided by human values higher than intelligence. They are totally devoid of natural instincts and insight, morality, principles, ethics and plain common sense. They are just forces that can uncaringly and indifferently swing either way.

How high was the IQ of certain historical personalities such as the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and writers, characters like Moses, Jesus, Buddha or Maimonides, compared to individuals like Nero, Caligula, Genghis Khan, Marquis de Sade or Adolf Hitler. Impossible to know, but most likely they all enjoyed IQs of geniuses. The actions they took were determined not by their intelligence but by the additional “ingredients” mentioned above, or the lack of them.

It seems that too much emphasis was and is still placed on our two contemporary “holy cows”: intelligence and education. How much education and literacy did Jesus, a simple carpenter, or Hitler, a lowly house painter, possess? Probably not much, yet their messages and their impact were diametrically opposite. The problem is that with all our past and present intelligence and education, we still only have questions—clever questions, brilliant questions, witty, ordinary, plain and simple or just stupid questions. But the world thirsts for answers.

How profound and challenging was Shakespeare’s literate question, “To be or not to be?” compared to that of an illiterate peasant who, puzzled by life’s inconsistencies, would swear “What the fuck is this life all about?” Crude? Vulgar? To be sure, but basically the same question that Shakespeare asked.

I believe, dear Mr. Hedges, that the real answers lay far ahead of our present evolutionary stage, and until we find them, if ever, we’ll have to be content with the temporary Band-aids of education and literacy, irrespective of how poorly taught and used they are, and all the baggage that comes with them such as the ones your elucidated in your article: manipulations, clichés, ambiguities and emotionally charged mass “decisions” based on cheap slogans.

I hope I didn’t depress you too much.

Any comments?

Sincerely,

Ed Binder

Daltonsbriefss last blog post..Indiana Supreme Court ruling on election eve