As can be expected, Waterville native Alan Caron succinctly defined the root cause of an intelligence deficit in this country. He attributes the intelligence deficit to increasing incidents of stupidity in our society. Among those incidents, Caron reports that Trump said he did not understand his campaign promise to spend billions to fix the decayed and failing infrastructure, was counter to the platform of the Republican Party.
More to the point Caron makes is that the dumbing down of this country has of late been increasing and has never been as glaringly evident as it is today. His recitation of the knowledge deficit among our society is revealing, (Morning Sentinel January 1, 2017). Gullibility of many social media addicts is clearly evident by their sharing of fake news and misinformation and disinformation, ad infinitum.
The most ill-informed among us can easily be fooled and encouraged to display utter ignorance of facts and truth. We have at our fingertips (actually thumbs) small computers called phones that give instant access to favorite platforms, Facebook and Twitter, on which to spread or share an ignorance of facts, misinformation and disinformation.
Now, even the social media addicted president elect uses twitter consistently to display his ignorance of foreign policy, but more often to spread hate, misogyny, racial discrimination and disinformation.
The spreading ignorance, disinformation and misinformation must be addressed and steps taken to stop the wasting away of intelligence in our society. The more ignorant society becomes, the more insecure we are as a nation. For example an ignorant society can easily be overcome by a cyber adversary.
It may be too late for change by those of that aren’t interested in self-improvement through education. And there may be little that can be done about those that won’t make the effort to find facts that refute misinformation, disinformation and fake news. But what can be done is to overtly expose as often as possible what uninformed verbalizing and writing actually is, a demonstration of factual ignorance.
Some may avoid doing this, not wanting to appear arrogant, but if we don’t make an effort to confront stupidity, all of society will irreparably suffer from this cancer of ignorance. Doing nothing assures we are on the same path as the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.