I remember getting into a huge Twitter brawl with someone who insisted that regular folks were too stupid to know how to don a surgical mask.
When institutional authorities lie - telling people that masks are detrimental when the truth was the simply did have enough - not only is trust lost, for a long time, but also we aren’t motivated innovate and improvise.
How governments managed to convince so many people to overlook the basic laws of physics - any barrier is better than no barrier when the aim is to keep something out - still fucks my mind up. #breathtaking
@Remittancegirl For a generation—from roughly 1958 to 1978—US education policy was trying to produce educated citizens, both the skilled technical work force needed by a cold war military industrial complex and electors resistant to crude propaganda (whether fascist or communist). But from 1968 post-Nixon politics in the USA pushed back against the latter, and containerization and offshoring of key industries hollowed out demand for the former. A generation later? Widespread ignorance.
@Remittancegirl The same trend is running in the UK (note increasingly ideological Tory attacks on liberal arts education from 2010 onwards) and elsewhere.
Commercializing higher education and turning a degree into nothing more than an admission ticket to skilled employment (with huge loan debt attached) was part of the post-1968 fightback against student activism, itself a side-effect of having over-educated the next generation of electors (oops, not so easily led by propaganda).
@cstross@Remittancegirl Another chunk of this is an increasingly sharp separation between "educated" and "can alter the material world by their own efforts". There's increasingly strong class barriers being installed to make sure nobody with money has any contact with reality whatsoever.
@graydon@Remittancegirl As witness Tucker Carlson's supermarket revelation in Moscow. (It was a French supermarket. Not a Russian one. He didn't have a clue.)
Add comment