The Cure of Critical Thinking
It’s time to turn off the TV and do your own research. Start reading a wider range of newspapers and magazines. Read more critically. Watch TV new with a very different attitude than you had before. Always ask, what are they selling here, and who's selling it? And if you actually follow up on Stauber & Rampton's recommendation, you might consider the possibility of advancing your life a quantum leap by ceasing to subject your brain to mass media.
Develop a critical thinking "bullshit detector". Wake up and ask questions. What would you lose if you stopped watching TV and stopped reading mass newspapers? Would your life really suffer any financial, moral, intellectual, esthetic or academic loss from such a decision? Do you really need to have your family continually absorbing the illiterate, amoral, phony, uncultivated, desperately brainless values of the people featured in the average nightly TV programs? Are these fake robots a valuable model? Do you need to have life values constantly spoon-fed to you? Get off the couch and live a little!
Are those shows really amusing, or just a necessary distraction to keep you from facing reality, or trying to figure things out yourself by doing a little independent reading and serious independent thinking? Name one example of how your life is improved by watching TV news and reading the evening paper. Brain researchers have demonstrated that a few hours of television viewing induces the same mental state as heroin intoxication.
There's no question that as a nation, we're getting dumber year by year. Look at the presidents we've been choosing lately! Our leaders are hardly literate. Blatant grammar mistakes are ubiquitous in today's advertising and billboards. Literacy is now marginal in most American secondary schools. Geographic and historic awareness are pathetic. Three fourths of California high school seniors can't read well enough to pass their exit exams. (SJ Mercury 20 Jul 01) At least 10% of today's students have documented "learning disabilities," which are reinforced by special treatment and special drugs. Observe the intellectual level of the average mass-market movie with material aimed at the adolescent lust for huge explosions, mindless chase scenes, strategically placed silicone, fake martial arts, gratuitous violence and moronic dialogue.
This is the only life we get. We take no consumer goods or money out with us. Time is our total value. Why waste our time by allowing our potential, our personality, our values to be shaped, crafted, and limited according to the whims of these mass-market panderers? There are many important issues that are crucial to our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. If it's an issue where money or politics is involved, objective data won't be easy to obtain.
Remember a simple fact, if everybody knows something, that "knowledge" has been bought and paid for. Real knowledge takes a little effort, a little digging down at least one level below what "everybody knows."
The pursuit of real knowledge leads to dissent, disagreement, negotiation and final arrival at the synthesis of better knowledge. The pursuit of real knowledge is very active, not passive. Replace all of that drab television time with book clubs, community seminars and forums. You can call local leaders to account with town hall meetings.
Change from a passive consumer to an active citizen.
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