The more I engage with people the more I realise how important education is, education that includes acquiring the skills of inquiry, critical thinking, analysis, hermeneutics, and reflection.
Having acquired these skills – and experimented with them – we can begin to question perceived realities and begin to address the sources of the flood of information that washes over and around us all day every day, to challenge commonly held beliefs and dangerous but widespread rustic wisdom and, as a result, to make rational – and irrational – predictions about our future.
This has never been more important than it is in today’s world of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news.
This is, of course, why governments want to dumb society down. They don’t want any of us to think, to question, or to challenge. They want us responding, in the moment, to what they feed us, to what appeals to our most base emotions in the most visceral and simplistic ways. Governments want us to comply slavishly and without question with the essence of a piece of graffiti I saw painted on the exterior of a house in Christchurch in 1989.
It said ‘consume, be silent, die.’
Since then, ‘work’ has been added at the start of that phrase to make it ‘work, consume, be silent, die’.
I am inclined to add ‘conform.’
‘Conform, work, consume, be silent, die’.
Neil Roberts got it right when, in 1982, he wrote ‘we have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity’ on the wall outside the Whanganui home of the nation’s computerised security system. He then blew himself up creating a full stop that has echoed with thinking people ever since. It’s taken awhile, but I think we’re finally waking up.
Tihei Mauri Ora!
dykiegirl 