Civilization… its broadest definition is “the society, culture, and way of life of a particular area”. A people are considered “Civilized” when their “society, culture, and way of life” have reached a “stage of human social development and organization that is considered most advanced”.
Let’s consider those last few words… “most advanced”… just for a minute. Advanced in what? Obviously we’re not talking about time… that would just be silly. We can’t be talking about technical achievements either or it could be argued that the invention of the nuclear bomb was a huge leap in being “civilized”. Technology has for the most part brought on nearly as many problems as it has solved over the years anyway.
Possibly the answer can be found by looking at the synonyms of the word “civilized”?
Those are:
cultured, educated, enlightened, humane, refined, sophisticated
One of those words kind of jumps out as the true root here, as it is included in the definition of almost every other word on that list… and that is “educated”. So if education is the defining factor in determining a people’s level of civilization… doesn’t that currently put the USA as the 14th most civilized country on earth?
The uneducated are easy to fool… they have little to no skills in critical-thinking and will believe things that an educated person would dismiss as simple propaganda, racism, misogyny and/or straight-up lies. They also latch on to pure fiction to achieve a form of approbation of their baser fears.
Sadly, “educated” is a bit of an amorphous term. A person can be educated by our current standards and still remain largely ignorant. And why is that? Because our current educational system is not interested in creating cultured, enlightened, humane, refined or sophisticated individuals… they just want their money-making system to continue to churn out more and more cogs to fit into their machine. Replaceable cogs that will hopefully make it to be bigger cogs that can then redirect money and raw materials (children) back to the mother machine that created them all.
With this goal as their destination, their product is by and large:
boorish, misinformed, near-sighted, brutish, raw, simplistic
Sound familiar?
Sound like [insert republican name here]?
Now you must understand this is not the teachers fault. Most of them are good people struggling to inject as much knowledge and wisdom into our children’s brains as they can, but they are largely forgotten or completely ignored when they ask for help and support from our educational system and government. Every year they face budget cuts and downsizing and are expected to “do more with less”. Sadly, this has been the state of affairs for so long that we are now seeing a taste of our future. This taste speaks of a future that I can only call bleak.
That “taste” is in no way better embodied in the simple fact that a misogynistic, heartless, narcissistic, simplistic, fascist boor is currently aiming to be our president… and has a chance. Instead of an educated populace with the level of comprehension and critical thinking you would expect from one of the largest and most progressive countries in this world seeing through the smoke and mirrors the republicans have brought to the table, and laughing them off of their soapbox… we have Mr. Trump and his ilk spouting complete fantasies and outright lies, and the masses sucking it up. Many of them don’t even realize when one of these con-artists comes out and directly explains how they plan to fleece our country (i.e. the people) out of their rights, their freedom and even their lives… they just keep cheering.