Nobody Wants to be F***ing Educated Anymore

The rat race is exhausting, and with endless subscription streaming services available to us, it’s easy to tune out the part of your spirit that’s screaming at you to WAKE UP AND DO SOMETHING. 

There are two possibilities: first, this is an unintended consequence of the ways digital media has organized our minds and shaped our experience of the world. Neil Postman makes this argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death. He describes how the telegraph made it possible for information to travel quickly across space, and how the photograph made that information feel real. The consequence is that we are bombarded with information from all over the nation (and the world!) so quickly that we cannot evaluate each fact’s implications, background, and connection to our own lives. We can talk about information, but we can’t take meaningful action – partly because we aren’t in conversation with our local community, but also because we are too busy being amused by the “peek-a-boo world” that Postman describes,

where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense, a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining (Postman, 77). 

There is a second possibility – that it’s not just the form of digital media that won’t “permit” us to do something. It is in the financial interest of the corporations that own the media to keep us amused and immobile. Postman insists “There is no conspiracy here”, but I’m not so sure (88). In his book What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Noam Chomsky argues that the purpose of the media, beyond selling audiences to advertisers, is: 

to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It’s unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what’s happening in the world. In fact, it’s undesirable – if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it” (Chomsky, 69).

You may not want to think of yourself as a member of the “bewildered herd”, but unless you’re a part of the 20% of people who play some role in policy and decision making (the “political class”), then you ARE a member of the bewildered herd. Hell, I am too. Here’s a few things I’m bewildered by:

1. Why do we allow people to be hungry, unhoused, and uneducated – when there is enough wealth in the world to solve these problems?
2. Why aren’t we doing everything humanly possible to stop climate change?
3. Why are schools still using the same subject-based system that they did back in the 1800s, instead of using an interdisciplinary, project-based learning approach?
4. Why did we stop prioritizing laborers and start prioritizing shareholders, and can we switch back?
5. Why don’t we have term limits on all politicians? And why do we let corporations give money to politicians?
6. Why do we allow people to make so much money off of war? And why do people want to make money off of war in the first place?
7. Why do we struggle to get along with people who are different from us, and is an “us vs. them” mindset evolutionarily ingrained, or socially constructed?
8. Why is it so hard to admit when we’re wrong and just…learn from it?
9. Is it part of human nature to seek power at others’ expense? Or is it possible for us to live in solidarity, sharing resources based on need?
10. What’s going to happen to humanity, and what individual power do I have to create change?

I find clues to the questions that bewilder me in books. Noam Chomsky (How the World Works) has a lot to say about the United States government, and why many things that are in my best interest aren’t in the interest of the corporations the government serves. Cedric J. Robinson (Black Marxism: The making of the Black Radical Tradition) gives an excellent overview of how Black-led revolutions inspired the European Marxist traditions – and maybe that’s the real reason the U.S. claims to be so afraid of the words “socialism” and “communism”. Ursela le Guin (The Dispossessed) helped me envision a functioning anarchist society. Yevgeny Zamyatin (WE) showed me that so long as humans have free will, there will always be suffering, but that suffering is worth it because there is also love. 

I started Novel Exchanges because I believe that conversations about literature are an opportunity to better understand ourselves and the world. Unless we challenge ourselves to express our thoughts and listen to those who disagree with us, we will stay complicit members of the bewildered herd. Together, in discussion, we can begin to imagine a different society – and then advocate for it. Social media alone isn’t enough. Not because there aren’t great ideas present in entertainment, but because we can’t engage with those ideas meaningfully. Parasocial relationships don’t build community, and doomscrolling is an escape from action, not a source of inspiration. We navigate the world more meaningfully when we read and discuss. Conversation forces us to acknowledge our biases, recognize new ideas, and articulate our own opinions. This is a scary task, and it is far easier to escape into the entertainment economy. Still, I encourage you – WAKE UP AND DO SOMETHING. Even if “doing something” is just having a conversation. 

Works Cited

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York, N.Y., Penguin Books, 2005.

Noam Chomsky. How the World Works. S.L., Penguin Usa, 2015.

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