- 6 months ago
Why does America distrust experts and celebrate ignorance? From Hofstadter to Postman to Jacoby, this video explores how anti-intellectualism shaped U.S. culture turning politics into entertainment, worshipping technology, and making truth optional.
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Mistery, Conspiracy, Secrets & Lies https://rumble.com/c/c-7695975
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Short filmTranscript
00:00One computer scientist at MIT became so disillusioned
00:04that he decided to build a computer program
00:07that would parody these hopeless attempts.
00:10He was called Joseph Weissenbaum,
00:13and he built what he claimed was a computer psychotherapist.
00:17Just like a therapist, people could come and talk to the machine
00:21by typing in their problems.
00:25Weissenbaum called the program ELIZA.
00:29He modelled it on a real psychotherapist called Carl Rogers,
00:32who was famous for simply repeating back to the patient
00:35what they had just said.
00:38And that is what Eliza did.
00:40The patient sat in front of the screen
00:42and typed in what they were feeling.
00:45And the program repeated it back to them,
00:48often in the form of a question.
00:51Men are all alike. In what way?
00:54They're always bugging us about something or other.
00:59Can you think of a specific example?
01:02Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
01:05Your boyfriend made you come here?
01:07He says, um, I'm depressed much of the time.
01:10I'm sorry to hear that you're depressed.
01:12It's true. I am unhappy.
01:15Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?
01:18Well, I need some help. That much seems certain.
01:22One of the first people to use Eliza was Weissenbaum's secretary,
01:26and her reaction was something that he had not predicted at all.
01:31And I asked her to my office and sat her down at the keyboard,
01:34and then she began to type.
01:35And, of course, I looked over her shoulder
01:37to make sure that everything was operating properly.
01:39After two or three interchanges with the machine,
01:42she turned to me and she said,
01:44Would you mind leaving the room, please?
01:46And yet she knew, as Weissenbaum did,
01:49that Eliza didn't understand a single word
01:52that was being typed into it.
01:54You're like my father in some ways.
01:57You don't argue with me.
01:59Why do you think I don't argue with you?
02:02You're afraid of me.
02:04Does it please you to think I'm afraid of you?
02:06My father's afraid of everybody.
02:11My father's afraid of everybody.
02:13Weissenbaum was astonished.
02:15He discovered that everyone who tried Eliza became engrossed.
02:19They would sit for hours telling the machine about their inner feelings
02:23and incredibly intimate details of their lives.
02:27They also liked it because it was free of any kind of patronising elitism.
02:32One person said,
02:34After all, the computer doesn't burn out,
02:38look down on you,
02:40or try to have sex with you.
02:46What Eliza showed was that in an age of individualism,
02:50what made people feel secure
02:52was having themselves reflected back to them,
02:56just like in a mirror.
02:58It's a shocking reality.
03:12Many Americans struggle with basic facts.
03:14In one survey, roughly 20% of US adults insisted the sun orbits the earth.
03:19You shouldn't have to be an intellectual to know otherwise.
03:22This isn't just trivial ignorance.
03:24It's a symptom of a deeper sickness.
03:26Anti-intellectualism.
03:27But where did this attitude come from and why does it persist?
03:30To answer that,
03:31we must look back to America's roots and forward through its culture.
03:34Contrary to what you might expect,
03:36American distrust of experts is old.
03:39Historian Richard Hofstadter traced it to the nation's founding values.
03:42Early Americans were fiercely egalitarian and pious in a religion of the heart,
03:47favoring the common sense of the people over inaccessible musings of professors.
03:52In other words, ideas were tools for living, not ends in themselves.
03:56Even business leaders bought into this.
03:58Knowledge mattered only for its cash value.
04:01This bred a popular view that intellectuals were aloof elites,
04:04out of touch with real life.
04:06Hofstadter noted that many dissenting thinkers felt morally on trial for being intellectuals,
04:11and reacted by railing against common wisdom,
04:13only pushing themselves further into the margins.
04:15This legacy of suspicion and hostility toward the life of the mind
04:19set the stage for the culture we see today.
04:22Our founding heroes valued critical thinking,
04:24but the broader society began to prize heart and hustle over headiness.
04:28As schools shifted to teach more technical skills and less rigorous academic content,
04:32core knowledge was devalued.
04:34Hofstadter even warned mid-20th century
04:36that education reformers were treating academic subject matter as secondary to utility.
04:40In sum, anti-intellectualism did not spring up overnight.
04:44It grew from pride in egalitarianism and practicality.
04:48But that was just the beginning of the story.
04:50The real turning point came with a new force in American life, mass media.
04:54Enter television.
04:55In the 20th century, a new kind of media emerged that reshaped how Americans think.
04:59Neil Postman famously argued that TV turned public discourse into show business.
05:04It gave us the illusion of being informed while actually creating a flood of trivial information
05:08that he called disinformation.
05:10In Postman's words, TV news didn't lie outright, but it mixed in,
05:14misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, or superficial information
05:18that makes people feel knowledgeable without true understanding.
05:21On television, images and emotions became the true currency of communication.
05:25As Neil Postman observed,
05:27Americans no longer exchanged ideas so much as they exchanged impressions.
05:31What mattered most was not the weight of one's reasoning,
05:34but the resonance of one's appearance.
05:36Debates ceased to be measured by the strength of arguments
05:39and instead were scored by who smiled more convincingly,
05:42who spoke in sound bites that fit neatly between commercial breaks.
05:46Nixon didn't just lose because he was dishonest,
05:48he lost because he looked dishonest under the unforgiving glare of the camera.
05:52Reagan, by contrast, didn't persuade with policy so much as with presence.
05:56He simply looked like the kind of man Americans wanted to trust.
05:59This shift carried profound consequences.
06:01Television taught politicians that performance was more valuable than principle,
06:05that the theater of looking right outweighed the substance of being right.
06:09It rewarded charisma over competence, optics over truth.
06:13Over time, this dynamic seeped into the cultural bloodstream,
06:16redefining the very meaning of public conversation.
06:19What once demanded patience, nuance, and critical thought
06:22was steadily repackaged into short bursts of entertainment,
06:25easily consumed and easily forgotten.
06:27Perhaps I can help you, Chuck.
06:29I think the election was a victory for good government.
06:32It might also be called a victory for propaganda.
06:35But that would have been equally true if our opponent had won.
06:39But how can you study it?
06:40Well, you can begin by investigating the techniques of propaganda.
06:45Here.
06:46I've listed some of the main ones.
06:48Glittering generalities.
06:50What is a glittering generality?
06:52That headline you were quoting.
06:55A victory for good government.
06:57Good government is a phrase we use many times during the campaign.
07:01We said the mayor stood for good government and promised good government.
07:06But it's true, isn't it?
07:07What's true?
07:08What does good government mean?
07:10Is the mayor's idea of good government the same as yours?
07:13I see.
07:14It's a glittering generality.
07:15One of the best.
07:17There's another.
07:18Yes.
07:19And why do you suppose our opponents chose that phrase?
07:22I guess because everybody likes a real American.
07:25Right.
07:26And they wanted to transfer that liking for a real American to Mr. Butler.
07:30A day or so after that poster came out, I said in one of my campaign speeches,
07:37Our opponent advertises himself as a real American.
07:41I say he is unreal, unrealistic.
07:44He is a visionary, a theorist, a dreamer.
07:47He is so thirsty for public office that like a weary traveler in the desert, he sees a mirage and he is trying to sell it to you as real.
08:00There.
08:01Now what would you call that?
08:03That's name calling, visionary, theorist, dreamer.
08:06That's right.
08:07And those are very polite names.
08:10For my collection of propaganda materials, I've made a special record of part of one of Mr. Butler's radio speeches.
08:18Mayor Cooper asks that he be judged by his performance in office.
08:24Very well.
08:25Let's ask him who was mayor when the municipal waterworks fell into such a state of disrepair that the whole town was without water for two days.
08:34Let's ask him.
08:36But no, let's not.
08:39It might embarrass him.
08:41That's what we call card stacking.
08:44Cooper was mayor when the pumping station broke down.
08:47But it was the men in office before him who allowed it to get into such a rundown condition.
08:52And it finally gave way before he could get anything done.
08:55And card stacking is choosing some facts and leaving out others and arranging them to suit your purpose.
09:01Now, did you see our little campaign movement?
09:04Yes, a couple of times.
09:06Well, let's look at it again.
09:08Land sakes.
09:13A body hardly has time enough.
09:15The house to clean, the washing to do, and the men folks to feed.
09:20They like their chocolate cakes, too.
09:24But I do want to take time to tell you that I've known Dick Cooper ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper.
09:31He comes of a good, respectable family, just as honest as the day is long.
09:37And he knows our town.
09:39He's one of us.
09:41That's why I'm going to vote for Mayor Cooper.
09:44And all my friends are going to vote for him, too.
09:47Recognize the technique?
09:48That must be what you call plain folks.
09:50That's right.
09:51You'll find many versions of the appeal based on the common man, the man on the street, log cabin to president.
09:59Now, let's look at the rest of the movie.
10:02Yes, Mrs. Hamline is voting for Mayor Cooper.
10:06Her friends are voting for Mayor Cooper.
10:09Your friends are voting for Mayor Cooper.
10:12The people know what they want, and what they want is Mayor Cooper.
10:17Don't you be left behind.
10:19Get on board the Victory Special.
10:22Vote for Mayor Cooper and ride with him to victory.
10:27That ending's easy to spot.
10:31It's the bandwagon.
10:32Yes, the propaganda we've been talking about is easy to detect.
10:36But a great deal of propaganda is much more hidden, much harder to detect.
10:40That's what's bothering me.
10:42Even in a small local election, there's so much propaganda.
10:46That poster, a real American, uses a transferred device.
10:52Does that mean it isn't true?
10:54Not necessarily.
10:55Evaluating propaganda isn't that simple.
10:58Recognizing the technique is one step.
11:01Another step is to know the purpose.
11:04What is the purpose here?
11:05That's easy.
11:06To get people to vote for Butler.
11:08Yes, to persuade people that Butler is the better man.
11:11To move them to vote for him.
11:13In short, to sell Mr. Butler to the voters.
11:16You'll find that the purpose of most propaganda is to persuade people to believe something,
11:21to do something, or to buy something.
11:24All right.
11:25But it still doesn't answer my question.
11:27No.
11:28Your next step, and it's a big one, is to get the facts.
11:33Well, is he a real American?
11:38Howard Butler was born in this country.
11:40He obeys its laws.
11:42He's a good citizen.
11:43Yes, he is a real American.
11:46The same can be said for Richard Cooper.
11:49So ask yourself whether the facts support the purpose.
11:53Do they support the transfer of feeling from real American to Mr. Butler over Mr. Cooper?
11:59No, I guess not.
12:01Well, that's your fourth step.
12:03Weigh the facts against the purpose and the technique.
12:06I think I understand.
12:08To know whether propaganda is good or not, whether it's true or not.
12:12I should know the purpose, recognize the technique, get the facts, and judge the purpose and technique by the facts.
12:20But when you want the facts about live political battle, don't come to a campaign manager.
12:26I might do it at that.
12:27But I will also go and see your opposition.
12:29Well, that's all right.
12:31Whenever you're tracking down propaganda, get as many different points of view as you can.
12:36Do you know something?
12:37What?
12:38I think that it might be interesting to make a really serious study of propaganda.
12:42I find it interesting, and there's plenty to study.
12:45Here I have just a few of the many books on the subject.
12:48You can read them.
12:49You can keep your eyes and ears open for little bits of propaganda.
12:53And, of course, you can study whole propaganda campaigns.
12:57Here are a few on which I've been gathering material.
13:01Hitler and Nazi Germany had a campaign of propaganda that ran over many years.
13:06Then there's a wealth of propaganda to study on the subject of Russia and communism.
13:11There's propaganda to study in our own American elections, national as well as local.
13:18And in many of the major issues on which elections often hinge.
13:22Well, if I don't learn about propaganda, it won't be because there's no way to study it.
13:27That's right, Chuck.
13:28Remember the techniques of propaganda and use the procedure we are.
13:32It's a powerful force.
13:33So powerful that your study, your study of propaganda is important not only to you, but to me and to the world.
13:45Postman warns us that when serious dialogue is reduced to spectacle, the collective intellect of a nation begins to erode.
13:52The issues that shape people's lives get flattened into slogans.
13:55The deep work of democracy is treated as another variety show.
13:59And the citizen becomes more spectator than participant.
14:02Distraction takes the place of deliberation.
14:04Trivia replaces truth.
14:06And what should bind a society together's shared understanding gets drowned in the noise of endless entertainment.
14:11The danger, then, is not merely that we laugh when we should be thinking, but that eventually we lose the capacity to think at all.
14:18When politics, culture, and even morality are filtered through the logic of television, the result is a form of cultural infantilization.
14:25A baby talk version of discourse.
14:27Where the hard edges of reality are softened into digestible images.
14:31And when a people grow accustomed to baby talk, they risk surrendering not just their attention, but their very ability to govern themselves.
14:39That, Postman argues, is the true path toward cultural death, not through tyranny or censorship, but through distraction so total that truth becomes irrelevant.
14:52At 43, JFK is one of the youngest men to ever run for president.
14:57His hip approach to campaigning injects a new energy to politics.
15:04I come to the Bronx as an old Bronx boy. I used to live in the Bronx.
15:09The handsome young senator has a lot to overcome.
15:14But the Kennedy campaign has a plan to sell him to the country.
15:20Now, 90% of U.S. households own a television.
15:27Good evening. The television stations of the United States are proud to provide facilities for a discussion of issues by the two major candidates for the presidency.
15:37On September 26, 1960, 70 million people tune in to America's first televised presidential debate.
15:44I'm not satisfied until every American enjoys his full constitutional rights.
15:52JFK is prepped for his television appearance.
15:56The day before, he met with producers and discussed camera angles.
16:01He looks tanned and glowing.
16:04I don't want the talents of any American to go to waste.
16:07He is wearing a blue suit and shirt to reduce glare and stand out against the great backdrop.
16:13Mr. Smith, Senator Kennedy...
16:18Nixon looks exhausted.
16:19He's straight from the campaign trail and is recovering from the flu.
16:24He also has a knee injury, making him appear uncomfortable and shifty.
16:28I wonder if you can explain that, sir.
16:30There is no question but that we cannot discuss our internal affairs in the United States
16:36without recognizing that they have a tremendous bearing on our international position.
16:41Mr. Vice President...
16:43His gray suit and pale face appear to blend into the set.
16:45It's a very important campaign issue.
16:47I'd like to follow Mr. Norman's question.
16:48The visual contrast between the men damages Nixon.
16:50And now the candidates will answer questions or comment upon one another's answers to questions.
16:54Viewers think Kennedy has the edge, even though radio listeners have the opposite impression.
17:03During the debate, Kennedy's on-camera performance makes him look like a leader.
17:08And all doubts about his youth are forgotten.
17:11Studies will later show that this debate made up the minds of 4 million voters.
17:173 million vote for Kennedy.
17:20Television transformed politics into a spectacle where appearance mattered more than substance.
17:28That shift didn't just change presidential debates, it laid the groundwork for how the left versus right divide is packaged and sold to the public.
17:35Once images and emotions became the currency of politics, wedge issues like abortion, guns, and race were perfectly suited for the medium.
17:42They could be dramatized in 30-second clips, boiled down into slogans, and repeated endlessly to keep viewers hooked.
17:49This is why divide and conquer politics thrives.
17:52People aren't exchanging ideas, they're exchanging images and emotions.
17:56The media in turn profits by fueling outrage and keeping politics framed as a kind of sport one.
18:01Where the audience cheers for their team rather than questioning the rules of the game itself.
18:06The result is that, while Americans are distracted by emotionally charged images of cultural battles, the deeper systemic issues corporate power, wealth inequality, environmental collapse, fade quietly into the background.
18:19Postman's warning about public conversation turning into baby talk resonates here.
18:23Left versus right debates often reduce serious issues into simplistic binaries.
18:28Good versus evil, freedom versus tyranny, red versus blue.
18:32This shallow form of discourse makes it nearly impossible to grapple with the complexity of systemic problems.
18:38Instead, people are encouraged to latch onto surface level symbols, a flag pin, a sound bite, a viral clip while the machinery of power continues largely unchallenged.
18:48Yet, there are moments when Americans break free from the spectacle.
18:51Postman warned that when truth gives way to trivia, a culture risks collapse.
18:56But history also shows the renewal that comes when people pierce through the noise and rediscover their shared struggles.
19:03The civil rights movement, Occupy Wall Street, Today's labor strikes, each reveals that behind the scripted theater of partisanship lies a deeper reality that binds ordinary people together across ideological divides.
19:16The universal fight for dignity, fairness, and survival.
19:19Television reshaped the very fabric of American life.
19:22News, politics, religion, even education.
19:25All were reconfigured into spectacles designed less to inform than to entertain.
19:30Postman's warning, amusing ourselves to death, captured the essence of this shift.
19:34A society so immersed in diversions that it mistook stimulation for substance.
19:39Programs favored catchy slogans over serious debate, while commercials told bite-sized stories that appealed to desire and fantasy rather than honesty or truth.
19:48In time, the public grew accustomed to consuming reality through a funhouse mirror, colorful, exciting, and dramatic, but hopelessly distorted.
19:57The consequences of this transformation were profound.
20:00A generation learned to expect that the serious must also be entertaining, that knowledge should be packaged as spectacle.
20:06Issues once requiring patience and depth became compressed into slogans, symbols, and surface impressions.
20:12Substance gave way to style, and complexity was eclipsed by the quick thrill of amusement.
20:17Introducing Macintosh.
20:18Introducing Macintosh.
20:21It does all the things you'd expect a business computer to do.
20:24It does a lot of things you wouldn't expect a business computer to do.
20:29And it does some things no other business computer has ever done before.
20:34Of course, to do all this, you will have to learn to do this.
20:40Macintosh from Apple.
20:47Then came computers and the internet.
20:49And the logic of television did not fade.
20:51It intensified.
20:52If television reduced truth to entertainment, the digital age turned it into a commodity of speed and volume.
20:59Online, the principles of amusement collided with the culture of immediacy.
21:03Instant access, infinite scrolling, endless feeds.
21:06What television once did on a daily cycle, the internet now performs by the second.
21:11In this new environment, the funhouse mirror became an infinite hall of mirrors.
21:16Reality is fragmented into memes, tweets, headlines, and viral clips.
21:20Each one engineered to capture attention, not to cultivate understanding.
21:24The result is a public discourse even more fractured, more reactive, more dependent on the constant stimulation of novelty.
21:31Where television taught us to laugh when we should have been thinking, the internet teaches us to click, swipe, and move on before thought can even begin.
21:38And so, the question lingers.
21:40If a society could amuse itself to death in the television age, what happens when the distractions multiply infinitely?
21:46When attention itself becomes the most valuable commodity?
21:49The danger is no longer just trivialization, it is disorientation.
21:54A culture that cannot distinguish truth from spectacle, fact from entertainment, risks not only cultural decay but a collapse of its shared reality altogether.
22:02As America entered the digital age, Neil Postman argued that something profound had shifted.
22:08He called it technopoly, a condition where technology is not merely a tool we use, but a power we revere.
22:14In this new order, culture no longer grounds itself in wisdom, tradition, or moral vision.
22:19Instead, it seeks its authority in the latest technical breakthrough.
22:23What was once judged by human values is now reshaped by technology itself.
22:27Postman described it starkly, a totalitarian technocracy in which every form of cultural life must bow before the sovereignty of technique.
22:35Does it understand what it's doing in the sense that we do?
22:39It's easy to leap to false conclusions, as Professor Weissenbaum discovered when he created Eliza.
22:46Eliza is a computer program that anyone can converse with via the keyboard, and it'll reply on the screen.
22:52We've added human speech to make the conversation more clear.
22:59Men are all alike.
23:01In what way?
23:02They're always bugging us about something or other.
23:07Can you think of a specific example?
23:09Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
23:13Your boyfriend made you come here?
23:15He says, um, I'm depressed much of the time.
23:18I'm sorry to hear that you're depressed.
23:21It's true.
23:22I am unhappy.
23:23Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?
23:27The computer's replies seem very understanding, but this program is merely triggered by certain phrases to come out with stock responses.
23:36Nevertheless, Weissenbaum's secretary fell under the spell of the machine.
23:39And I asked her to my office and sat her down at the keyboard, and then she began to type.
23:44And, of course, I looked over her shoulder to make sure that everything was operating properly.
23:48After two or three interchanges with the machine, she turned to me and she said, would you mind leaving the room, please?
23:54And yet she knew, as Weissenbaum did, that Eliza didn't understand a single word that was being typed into it.
24:03You're like my father in some ways.
24:06You don't argue with me.
24:08Why do you think I don't argue with you?
24:10You're afraid of me.
24:12Does it please you to think I'm afraid of you?
24:15My father's afraid of everybody.
24:22My father's afraid of everybody.
24:25Think about how instinctively we defer to our devices.
24:28A smartphone doesn't just help us, it tells us what to do, where to go, how to feel, what to believe.
24:34We trust it more than we trust ourselves.
24:36The computer, Postman argued, became the quintessential emblem of this era, celebrated for thinking better than we can.
24:43Today, algorithms don't simply organize our choices, they define the range of choices we believe exist.
24:48They shape our habits, our desires, even our sense of what's real.
24:52I myself was surprised at some of the studies I turned up that I cite in this book.
24:58The worst one, I think, is the National Geographic Roper poll of Americans from 18 to 25.
25:05After all, the age group that's doing nearly all of the fighting and dying in Iraq.
25:10And two thirds of them can't find Iraq on a map, a map that's marked with the names of countries.
25:16But more than that, when people were asked, when this age group were asked, is it important to know a foreign language?
25:24Or is it important to know the location of countries in which important news is being made?
25:31More than half of them said no.
25:33So, not knowing where Iraq is on a map, that's ignorance.
25:38Saying it's not important to know where it is on a map is saying, I'm ignorant and proud of it.
25:44Well, then let me ask you, what is the thrust of your beginning the book with the quote from Jefferson?
25:53Are you prophesying here that having dumbed down, we cannot also be free?
26:00I consider it a cautionary quote.
26:03If things keep going the way they're going, if there isn't some kind of a concerted effort to deal with this problem,
26:12I don't see how anything in our political culture can get better.
26:16But you seem to be, still to me, you seem to be kind of so uneasy about that Jeffersonian thought.
26:25Here it is.
26:26You can't dumb down and be free.
26:29I am uneasy about it.
26:31I mean, we can be free technically in the sense that we go to the polls.
26:35But certainly the founders thought, it was really their main article of faith, that democracy and maintaining it depended on an informed citizenry.
26:46A citizenry that was much more widely informed and more committed to free inquiry than the United States was at the time of independence.
26:55That's why they had a lot of faith in education.
26:59But as your old teacher Hofstadter pointed out, democratization of education was always coupled in America with a suspicion of too much learning.
27:09So the idea of practical learning for better jobs and maybe better citizenship was always an American ideal.
27:18On the other side, it was always the suspicion of the person who knows too much, talks too good.
27:24So the pandering isn't all that new.
27:27Now, the pandering isn't all that new.
27:30But what has changed in the last 40 years, and again, Hofstadter couldn't have anticipated this.
27:37He was writing really at the beginning of the video culture.
27:40What has happened, I think, that has added to all of the endemic American anti-intellectual tendencies that Hofstadter talked about is the saturation of our culture by 24-7 infotainment, which was just beginning.
27:56And it shows itself in the fact that we are becoming a nation not of illiterates, but, as I say, of illiterates.
28:03We are people who increasingly don't read books.
28:06According to the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006, only more than half of Americans under 44 read no book at all last year, other than what they might have needed to read if they were still in school.
28:21By that I mean no book.
28:23I don't mean that they didn't read Proust or Henry James.
28:26I mean that they didn't read any book.
28:28No detective story.
28:29No bodice ripper romance.
28:31No self-help book.
28:33Nothing.
28:34And you agree with my other late friend, Neil Postman, that we are amusing ourselves to death.
28:42Yes.
28:43And Neil Postman's book, which was published in 1986, was very prescient.
28:48He was published that book at the dawn of the computer era.
28:53You know, in other words, he hadn't seen what the visual use of the web would do and how greatly enhanced the ability of people to entertain themselves 24 hours a day would be by mobile digital technology.
29:08You know, we've become so used to this.
29:11And the fact is it's only 10 to 15 years that we've had the capacity through various portable devices to carry our entertainment with us 24 hours a day if we want to do it.
29:23And if you ride a bus in New York City, you know that a lot of people do want to do it.
29:27And the consequences, more dumbing down.
29:30The consequences are that for every time you spend in passive forms of acquiring information and entertainment, you're not doing something else.
29:41Now, if you've read any of the reviews of my book, you see that some of them have taken me to task for being a technophobe.
29:47And I'd sort of like to answer the critics who aren't here.
29:50I'm not a technophobe.
29:52I simply point out that computers, the web, they're tools.
29:58They're wonderful tools.
29:59They're great tools for getting information.
30:02I'm really happy that when I forget a date that I don't have to go through 10 books to find it.
30:07I can just click on the Internet and find out what the date of some battle was or how to spell the name of some country whose name has been changed.
30:16But that's just information.
30:18It's a shortcut to getting information.
30:21That information doesn't mean anything, one, if you don't know how to look for it.
30:26That is to say, you don't know what you're looking for.
30:29But most particularly, it doesn't mean anything if it doesn't connect to a body of knowledge.
30:35I'd compare it to the web to a calculator.
30:39Now, when I do my tax returns, I don't add up the figures by hand.
30:43I use a calculator when I send stuff to my accountant.
30:46But I know, for example, I understand fractions and percentages.
30:52If something came out $100,000 that ought to be only $10,000, I would know immediately in my head, because I understand the basic processes of math and percentages, that it was wrong.
31:04I might not know the exact dollar amount it was wrong, but I would know.
31:09But kids who only learn calculators can get the right answer.
31:13But if the calculator goes haywire, they'll be at a loss if they don't understand percentages and fractions.
31:20And just as an aside, our 15-year-olds are nearly at the bottom in all developed nations in their math literacy.
31:27So this is a kind of across-the-board thing.
31:29Well, the relationship of computers to knowledge is very much like the relationship of calculators to math.
31:36What computers have in them is what we put in them.
31:40What we get out of them is what we look for in.
31:43So if you're looking for great things, you can find them on the Internet.
31:47And if you're looking for garbage, if what you want to do is watch people indicting their estranged spouses on YouTube and throwing up on YouTube, you'll do that.
31:56Garbage in, garbage out.
31:57Now, a lot of people are very angry at me for saying that computers are just tools.
32:02And I don't know why.
32:04This may be one of the problems that America has.
32:09It's an almost childlike faith in technological solutions to every problem.
32:15As though what was on the web isn't what people have put there.
32:19As though it exists as some kind of a godlike source of knowledge.
32:23What then, you've been an historian here in this book, turn out to be a prophet.
32:30And what do you prophesy?
32:32I really hate to be asked that question.
32:36I don't feel very optimistic.
32:39I particularly don't feel optimistic because just since I've been writing this book,
32:44there has been a push by video marketers to reach the last untouched market,
32:49which are children from infancy to about two years old.
32:53Until a few years ago, what was available in videos was aimed at two years and above.
32:58Now, they're promoting various things like home box offices, classical baby.
33:05They're promoting it for infants from six months old.
33:09And when pediatricians, the American Academy of Pediatrics says there is no safe level of viewing for kids that young
33:17because it stunts vocabulary development, among other things.
33:21A psychiatrist from Harvard Medical School who, guess what, is also a consultant to HBO,
33:28came out with the incredible statement.
33:30To say that this kind of TV for babies is bad is tantamount to saying that art is bad.
33:36Well, this shows you, this is the reason I called this book The Age of Unreason, by the way,
33:41and did not use the word anti-intellectualism in the title.
33:44This is obviously a very well-trained man making an utterly unreasonable statement.
33:51Unpaid, well-trained person, do you think?
33:56I wouldn't know. I assume nobody, I assume when you're a consultant to HBO, you get a consulting fee.
34:03You and I have to think about still another field, and that is prenatal use of television.
34:11Maybe there are bucks to be made there. Okay, you and I…
34:15You didn't put a camera in the woman's uterus. I see it coming.
34:19The result is a profound reordering of the mind.
34:22Once deep thought required patience, weighing evidence, reflecting on memory, wrestling with contradictions,
34:28now the very possibility of contemplation erodes under the constant hum of instant answers.
34:33Why wrestle with a question when Google can deliver a response in less than a second?
34:37Why cultivate memory when every fact can be retrieved with a tap?
34:41In this way, technology seduces us into outsourcing not just our labor, but our very capacity for judgment.
34:47And with this outsourcing came the flood. In Technopoly, the problem is not scarcity of information but glut,
34:53an avalanche of data, pouring in faster than we can absorb or evaluate.
34:58More words, images, and statistics are produced in a single day than an individual could process in a lifetime.
35:05The sheer volume overwhelms, leaving us not enlightened, but numb.
35:09Spelling and grammar are corrected before we notice mistakes.
35:12Recommendations appear before we even articulate what we want.
35:16Tools meant to liberate us from drudgery end up eroding the very skills and sensibilities that once defined human intelligence.
35:22In short, convenience has its price. What began as assistance quietly becomes dependence, and dependence hardens into submission.
35:31When every dimension of culture, education, politics, even personal identity, is filtered through the logics of efficiency, optimization, and speed, technology ceases to serve us.
35:41Instead, it masters us, rewriting our priorities in its own image.
35:45And beneath this transformation lies an even more unsettling development.
35:49The destabilization of truth itself, facts once considered sacred in science and policy, have become malleable, subject to fashion, manipulation, and persuasion.
35:58In the world of Technopoly, the line between truth and falsehood is not guarded by reason or evidence, but mediated by platforms, algorithms, and the whims of viral attention.
36:08In such a world Postman feared, we don't merely lose control of our tools, we risk losing our grip on reality itself.
36:15By the closing decades of the 20th century, politics had fully merged with spectacle.
36:20In the landscape Neil Postman warned about, truth no longer stood as the foundation of civic life, it became optional, even negotiable.
36:27Cultural critics like Susan Jacoby saw a dangerous decline, a decay of reason itself.
36:33In works such as The Dumbing Down of America, and The Age of American Unreason, she argued that political rhetoric increasingly rewarded charm over substance and charisma over evidence.
36:43What mattered was not whether something was true, but whether it was persuasive, catchy, and emotionally resonant.
36:49Television news accelerated this trend by teaching audiences that truth was always a matter of balance, that every issue had two equal sides, even when one was entirely fabricated.
36:58Jacoby called this dumb objectivity, the misguided belief that fairness requires giving myths the same platform as facts.
37:05The result was an intellectual flattening, where reason and superstition shared equal billing.
37:09She pointed to chilling examples.
37:11After 9-11, a major magazine ran a serious feature on biblical end times prophecies, as if rapture theology were simply another perspective to weigh alongside history and geopolitics.
37:21No secular scholars were interviewed, only those predicting divine apocalypse.
37:26Jacoby compared it to saying, 2 plus 2 equals 5, according to some, while mathematicians insisted equals 4.
37:34When media elevate fringe beliefs to the same level as science, the public loses its compass.
37:39The line between knowledge and fantasy blurs, and society drifts into a fog where evidence is only one opinion among many.
37:45In politics, the effects were just as corrosive, catchy slogans replaced serious debate, and emotional appeals proved more effective than rigorous reasoning.
37:53Leaders realized they didn't need to be truthful.
37:56They only needed to appear sincere.
37:58Once one side embraced the strategy, the other soon followed, plunging discourse into a race to the bottom.
38:03Voters, left without clear signposts, had to navigate a political landscape where truth was no longer anchored in evidence, but floated with the tides of feeling and persuasion.
38:12Jacoby's research shows how this collapse of standards reshaped the public mind.
38:16Polls revealed Americans holding contradictions without noticing them.
38:21Large numbers believed in miracles and angels, while half rejected evolution, placing faith-based folk beliefs on par with empirical science.
38:28In effect, knowledge itself became partisan, filtered through the lens of ideology and molded by wishful thinking.
38:34This culture of truthiness is not confined to one party or movement.
38:38Both sides have indulged it, and both have suffered its consequences.
38:42Leaders who scorn expertise embolden their followers to do the same.
38:45Communities that once welcomed debate now cocoon themselves in echo chambers, where dissenting voices are treated not as rivals in reason, but as threats to identity.
38:54Schools feel the ripple effect, civics, science, and critical thinking yield to whatever is popular, profitable, or politically convenient.
39:01In such a climate, facts are fragile things.
39:04They are easily outshouted by feelings, outmaneuvered by imagery, and outnumbered by opinions.
39:09Yet Jacoby insists this did not appear out of nowhere.
39:12It was seeded long before in the rise of modern media and technology, which trained the public to prize stimulation over reflection.
39:19By the time politics fully embraced spectacle, Americans had already been primed to prefer myth over memory, entertainment over knowledge.
39:27This is the crisis of our age. Not just misinformation, but an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge.
39:33A culture that forgets its past, distrusts its experts, and blurs the line between reality and fantasy.
39:39Is not simply uninformed, it is unmoored. And in that unmooring lies the deepest danger of all.
39:45Good business. Look, I'm quite serious. You are considered anti-technological. I'm so frequently called a Luddite to my face.
39:57What is going to happen? Others don't seem to have experienced, though if you turn to Europe, you see that the electronic revolution,
40:09has taken hold even more than it has here, but seemingly not with the same educational consequences.
40:19I think that is a really important question, because obviously the empire of infotainment doesn't have any national boundaries.
40:26What makes us more susceptible in other cultures to the worst as opposed to the best parts of the digital revolution?
40:35I think one of the things that makes us more susceptible is something I already mentioned, which is our kind of love affair with technology.
40:43The idea that it is more than it is. The other thing that makes us more susceptible, I really believe, is the fact that everybody who is brought up since World War II, let's say,
40:57everybody my age and younger has been brought up with the idea that we're number one. We're number one covers a multitude of sins.
41:07It's almost like a thumb sucking security blanket saying we don't have to do anything more.
41:14And when you look at these studies about our math and our science students and so on, you know that we're not going to be number one much longer.
41:23In many areas such as manufacturing, we're no longer number one. In certain scientific areas, we are also on the verge of not being number one.
41:33And certainly this has. But the idea that we're number one is very, very powerful.
41:39And in a way, it kind of impedes thinking about solutions, because if you just fall back on we're number one and also American exceptionalism.
41:49We're different. We're better. And don't look at what's really happening in the world. Then you don't think about solutions.
41:56Now, I have to say, since I published this book, I have received literally thousands of emails from young parents who are concerned about this.
42:04All I wanted to do with my book was to start a conversation about this subject, which has to precede anything we might do at the public level to impede some of these forces that are dumbing us down.
42:19And one of that conversation has to be about how we use our own time and how we allow our young children, because those are the only people parents have any control over once they go off.
42:30Once they go off on their own when they're about six or seven, we have less and less control over them.
42:34I've had so many people come up to me after talks and say, I'd love to read more, but I just don't have the time.
42:42Well, what we have to be thinking about as part of this conversation is, why don't we have the time?
42:48In our households, we have the time to have television on seven hours a day.
42:53Young boys have three hours a day to spend on video games.
42:58Now, if you are spending all of your time on these things, whether you're a parent vegged out on the couch or a kid using video games or spending hours on MySpace, then of course you don't have time to read books.
43:13Of course, you don't have time to think quietly.
43:16You don't have time to do any of those things.
43:18But there isn't any law that says we have to keep spending our time this way.
43:22And by the way, I'm not one of those people who thinks that nobody should ever watch TV or you should never let your kid watch a video.
43:30The problem is, let's say, the hour when you put a kid in front of a video, when you come home and you want to talk to your spouse and you want to have an hour of uninterrupted adult conversation.
43:39That's not a problem.
43:41The problem is when that hour turns into two and three and four and five habitual hours, when it occupies the weekends.
43:48That's the problem.
43:49And that, I believe, is the first force dumbing down our culture.
43:54All of the others, in a way, are secondary to it.
43:57The sound bite that has become our political culture is a product of this culture of infotainment.
44:03It's strange to me that what you don't say is that the American motto or theme or whatever you might want to call it, that the bottom line is our bottom line.
44:15And that we lure our children into these things.
44:20I'm surprised that you don't do that.
44:22But let me ask you something.
44:24You say toward the very end of your book, memory has been the greatest civic casualty of the past 50 years.
44:32Yes.
44:33What do you mean?
44:34Yes.
44:35Because, and again, this is part of our political process.
44:40Look, we have heard almost nothing about the war in Iraq in the political campaign in the last two months.
44:47We heard a lot about it at the beginning.
44:49Why?
44:50Because there aren't quite as many Americans dying with the surge.
44:55So the personal arguments between Hillary and Barack have pushed the war off TV.
45:02We can't seem to be able to carry through a conversation about an issue unless bombs are exploding in our own faces.
45:11And when I say that memory has been a casualty, to talk about the war in Iraq, you have to talk about how it started, which means that you have to be able to remember what happened five years ago.
45:25And only in America, I think, could somebody say that their vote five years ago didn't matter and that that was what everybody was doing then and have that accepted.
45:38To discuss anything intelligently that's a matter of policy, you have to have some memory.
45:43And again, I think the video culture is very much a part of that.
45:47I make no brief for a lot of the junk that appears in newspapers and in many books.
45:52But if you see something wrong in a book or in the newspaper, for that matter, something that doesn't quite track with you, you can go and compare it with other sources and look at a lot of things.
46:03When I hear a candidate saying something on TV, chances are I'm only half paying attention with half an ear anyway.
46:10The sound bite is gone, except when they endlessly loop things like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
46:16The sound bite is gone and you don't have the opportunity to think about it.
46:21Now, all of this stuff is there on the Web. That's right.
46:25And you can use the Web to do this kind of thing.
46:28But very few people actually do, except for the most sort of intensely politically interested people.
46:35Newspapers, for instance, ten years ago thought online editions were going to save them.
46:40They're not.
46:41Young people don't read more newspapers online than they read print editions,
46:45which is to say only a small minority of the people who read online editions are under the age of 35.
46:52And also people read less online of a newspaper than they read of a print edition.
46:57People who want to look at sports go to the sports scores.
47:00The latest political brouhaha, you go to that.
47:03But the experience of reading the whole newspaper is gone.
47:06And I think that what we do, I argue, on the Internet is not reading.
47:11It's like being a vulture, swooping down for bits of information.
47:15That's what I do when I'm looking for a fact for my articles.
47:18It's what anybody who's using the Internet for work does.
47:21It's not the same experience as sitting and reading and thinking about it and letting it brew in your head.
47:27Because the whole purpose of the Internet, its beauty as well as its horror in terms of intellectual culture, is its quickness.
47:34We don't want to spend time with it.
47:36We want to spend time with it, but not with any one thing to read on it.
47:40Would you consider it inappropriate for one to suggest that maybe the best thing for us to do then
47:47is to accept, not relish, but accept your description.
47:54And it is an accurate, in my estimation.
47:57I don't think anybody really challenges your description of what is happening to us.
48:02Oh, yes, they do.
48:03Well, they may not like it, your description.
48:06You're putting your finger on where we are and who we are.
48:09But don't we have an obligation to think through instead a different framework, education,
48:16educational framework, a different political framework, if we ourselves are becoming such a different people,
48:25if memory and the loss of memory is so important.
48:30Why protest so much?
48:32Why not instead think in terms of what kind of politics will we have in the future?
48:39Well, people have thought in terms of what kind of politics we'd have in the future
48:45in a stupid society.
48:47All this Huxley thought about it in Brave New World, which I think is much more of a paradigm of what we have today
48:54than even than Orwell's.
48:56Orwell's embodied an idea of a tyranny from the top.
49:02But Huxley's, I think, and I'm not the first person to say this.
49:07Neil Postman made this observation first.
49:09Indeed he did.
49:10Huxley envisioned a world in which people wouldn't care very much about what their rulers were doing
49:17because they were sort of drugged by pleasure.
49:20In his case, literally drugged.
49:22Our drug, in addition to literal drugs, our drug is this infotainment that surrounds us.
49:29And I think that we have already had a vision of what the future would be like in a society more extreme than ours.
49:36And I don't see anything to do except try to fight it with those people who are willing to fight it.
49:42There are teachers who are willing to fight it.
49:45There are parents who are willing to fight it.
49:48I don't want to think about the creation of a culture which will happen anyway if we continue to go the way we're going.
49:55I don't want to think about the creation of a form of politics that would be as dumb as we have become so far.
50:02Susan Jacoby, maybe we're going to have to think the unthinkable.
50:06In the meantime, I hope as many people as possible read The Age of American Unreason.
50:12And thank you so much for joining me today.
50:15By now, a deep distrust of experts runs through much of American life.
50:19You can see it in who people choose to believe.
50:21A National Science Foundation survey recently lamented that large numbers of Americans cannot answer basic science questions.
50:28A problem so acute that the US now lags behind Europe in measures of general scientific knowledge.
50:34In politics, this skepticism has been weaponized.
50:37President Donald Trump made scorn for scientists and officials part of his brand,
50:41calling climate scientists hoaxsters and dismissing public health leaders as idiots.
50:46The hostility wasn't merely rhetorical.
50:48Polls confirmed that at any given time, roughly a third of Americans embrace openly anti-intellectual views.
50:55What does this look like in practice?
50:57It means people often prefer certainty over curiosity and charisma over credentials.
51:01For instance, a 2009 survey showed two-thirds of Americans believed abstract intellectual discussions were not useful for politics, compared to just 17% who valued them.
51:11About one-quarter of the population believes intellectuals have a negative impact on society.
51:16Confidence in higher education has collapsed as well.
51:19Only about a third of Americans say they trust colleges and universities today.
51:23In a culture that once regarded education as the ladder of opportunity, the ladder itself is now questioned.
51:29The cost of the suspicion is staggering.
51:31When expertise loses credibility, collective knowledge erodes.
51:35Postman described this shift with his metaphor of the citizen becoming an audience.
51:39Once that happens, public life is staged less like a serious debate and more like a vaudeville act performed for amusement, not understanding.
51:47Susan Jacoby captured the irony.
51:49Half of Americans claim the Bible as literal truth, yet most lack even a basic grasp of its contents.
51:55It is not simply ignorance, but a hollowing out of knowledge itself, where belief becomes unmoored from study and understanding is optional.
52:03Still, critics insist the decline is not irreversible.
52:06Jacoby and Postman sounded the alarm, but researchers like Matt Mata emphasized that anti-intellectualism, though prevalent and pernicious, is not destiny.
52:16His recent studies suggest that curiosity is the key.
52:19When Americans cultivate genuine interest in science, they become more receptive to evidence, even on polarizing issues like climate change.
52:26That finding points to a practical path forward.
52:29Schools that nurture wonder, free access to museums and libraries, open educational resources that invite exploration rather than demand rote learning.
52:37The more people feel invited into knowledge, the less alien and elitist it appears.
52:41Yet even with this hope, the warnings of dystopian literature feel uncomfortably close.
52:45Aldous Huxley's brave new world imagined a society not destroyed by pain, but lulled into passivity by pleasure.
52:52Postman argued that Huxley foresaw America's fate.
52:55In Huxley's world, people did not resist because they were oppressed, but because they no longer noticed.
53:00They did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
53:04Distraction was enough to dissolve critical thought.
53:06That vision echoes eerily in our daily lives.
53:10Netflix queues, endless scrolling, social media feeds designed to grab our attention but never let it settle.
53:16Like Huxley's conditioned citizens, we binge to forget but often without realizing what we're forgetting.
53:21The casualty is not just time, but thought itself.
53:25The capacity for reflection, skepticism, and the slow work of understanding.
53:29As Postman warned, serious public life has been reduced to baby talk, and our culture to a carnival of distractions.
53:36It is no surprise that truth itself seems powerless.
53:39In such an environment, the real danger is not that people are deceived, but that they stop caring whether they are deceived at all.
53:46From the austere classrooms of the 18th century, to the endless scroll of today's TikTok feeds, one truth becomes undeniable.
53:54Anti-intellectualism in America did not emerge by chance.
53:58It is the result of deep cultural currents, centuries in the making, that have shaped how we view knowledge, authority, and truth itself.
54:06The disdain for expertise, the suspicion of critical thought, the elevation of entertainment over inquiry, these are not isolated trends, but the culmination of choices baked into the nation's cultural DNA.
54:18Yet recognition is not resignation, awareness is the first step toward renewal.
54:23Thinkers like Richard Hofstadter, Neil Postman, and Susan Jacoby have already charted the terrain, offering us not just criticism but also a compass.
54:31Hoffstadter exposed how populous suspicion of intellect corrodes democracy.
54:35Postman warned us that a society enthralled by entertainment and technology would surrender its capacity for reflection.
54:41Jacoby reminded us of the enduring worth of rational inquiry in the face of cultural amnesia.
54:46Their message converges, if we wish to preserve freedom, we must first reclaim our capacity to think.
54:51Postman's admonition remains urgent.
54:54We must see and understand what our technologies are doing before they redefine what it means to be human.
54:59To ignore this is to accept the quiet tyranny of distraction, where the loudest voice replaces the wisest and where the constant stream of novelty numbs us to deeper meaning.
55:08So the question is no longer abstract but existential.
55:11Will America awaken to these warnings or will it sleepwalk into Huxley's nightmare, a world where truth drowns not in censorship but in irrelevance?
55:20The answer is not foreclosed.
55:22It is still possible to ignite curiosity, to teach not just information but wisdom, to demand discourse that elevates rather than entertains.
55:30Democracy, fragile as it is, has always depended on an informed citizenry.
55:35When citizens cease to think critically they become spectators, vulnerable to manipulation.
55:40But when they reclaim the habits of questioning and reflection, they become participants in shaping their collective destiny.
55:46History itself offers reassurance.
55:48From the free thinkers of the enlightenment to reformers who challenged ignorance in every generation, knowledge has always found allies in this land.
55:56The choice before us could not be starker.
55:58We can remain passive consumers, amused to death by the flickering screens that substitute distraction for meaning.
56:05Or we can become thinkers once more, insisting that truth still matters, that evidence still counts, and that reason is not obsolete.
56:13The path forward will not be easy, but the alternative, the slow erosion of intellect, freedom, and meaning is far costlier.
56:19In the end, the question is simple but profound.
56:22Will we choose comfort, or will we choose consciousness?
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