Originally published at GenerationExtant dot com on December 9, 2014
I read this article recently, and it is fantastic:
In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
If that's not a sign of the times, I don't know what is. We live in an era of great information but, as Greg Graffin once said,
"in such a wealth of information, why are you so poor?" Our news media is
useless pablum at best and
outright deplorable at
worst, and our politicians have never before tried so hard to get so many people to believe so many things that are clearly not borne out by those pesky little things called facts.
Indeed, we have all become quite confident idiots: assured in our beliefs, because everything is a belief now: we "Believe in America" when we support Mitt Romney, and we have to "Stand with Scott Walker," against some vaguely defined foe. On one hand, we have brilliantly evil political hacks who now how to abuse this misinformation and new political religion to deceive a large amount of the population who will believe anything said by the "right" people because not only have they successfully blended the revival tent and the bully pulpit, but they have also taken full advantage of media indolence to flood the airwaves with confirmation bias, wherein you believe what you believe because it supports what you believe.
Green Day was right back in 2004: it's calling out to Idiot America.
Which is not to say the Idiocracy is sequestered to only one side of the debate. Plenty of people defend any and all of President Obama's actions out of the same misguided sense of belief, even when their belief turns out to be paradoxical. From Pacific Standard, again:
In a survey of roughly 500 Americans conducted in late 2010, we found that over a quarter of liberals (but only six percent of conservatives) endorsed both the statement “President Obama’s policies have already created a strong revival in the economy” and “Statutes and regulations enacted by the previous Republican presidential administration have made a strong economic recovery impossible.” Both statements are pleasing to the liberal eye and honor a liberal ideology, but how can Obama have already created a strong recovery that Republican policies have rendered impossible?
We need to end this system of politics by
belief. We need to end this demagoguery and this political pablum. Ever since Watergate, we have had a disturbing love/hate relationship with our government: we love it when it takes care of us, but we're not ready to forgive it yet for past and current indiscretions.
We're not ready to move on, so instead we migrate from one false prophet to another, whether it was Bill Clinton saying "I feel your pain" while repealing Glass-Steagall, W. Bush vowing to hunt down terrorists and ultimately failing in every aspect of it, or even Barack Obama promising "Hope and Change" while failing to prosecute the big banks. We expect our politicians to be sinless messiahs, and we eviscerate them when they cannot deliver. This is not a healthy way to exist as a nation, and we must face this (which
I have covered
before), but the first step that needs to be taken can, again, be found in this Pacific Standard article:
The built-in features of our brains, and the life experiences we accumulate, do in fact fill our heads with immense knowledge; what they do not confer is insight into the dimensions of our ignorance. As such, wisdom may not involve facts and formulas so much as the ability to recognize when a limit has been reached. Stumbling through all our cognitive clutter just to recognize a true “I don’t know” may not constitute failure as much as it does an enviable success, a crucial signpost that shows us we are traveling in the right direction toward the truth.
As I wrote way back in 2012, America needs to learn how to be able to say "I don't know" and, in the process of doing so, find it somewhere inside us as a nation to not only forgive those who make mistakes (without the
transparent lip-service of a
for-profit charlatan preacher) but also to forgive ourselves for making the mistake of believing in the first place. It is not a crime to believe, but it is shameful to never forgive.
I am currently working with my wife on a possible proposal to my high school alma mater. The proposal would seek to turn the school into a technology and vo-tech focused school, attempting to specialize the small country school district. In my mind, specialization is the way to save rural schools, but never in my life would I have thought I would be fighting to preserve a school that played host to so many of my worst memories. But, in an effort to practice what I preach, I am looking for forgive and forget, working for the betterment of all, and disregarding the sins of the past. It's not easy; in fact, it's pretty damned hard... but if any good is to come out of this world, people are going to have to start gritting their teeth.