COMFORTABLE IN THEIR OWN IGNORANCE

Recently Bill Maher of all people, challenged Charlie Roses's understanding of Islam which charitably put was sort of like Baptists and Muslims were cut from the same theological cloth.  Maher demolished Rose and exposed an all too common intellectual laziness that both liberals and progressives demonstrate on a consistent basis.  Simply put they are guilty of either willful or woeful ignorance.

Willful ignorance is a state of mind where ideology is substituted for reality and thus bad things happen.  Woeful ignorance is when people are badly educated (often by ideologues) and when they become active in the real world...bad things happen.  In either event those suffering from either are seemingly comfortable in their own ignorance. 

Academia today is an intellectual cesspool masquerading as a font of knowledge which indulges adolescent utopian fantasies divorced from the human condition.  Since the academic elite have an anti-America bent, its message is that the world is a mess because of rich, white, male, straight, religious Americans who stole everything they have from the "have nots".   In other words behind every "bank account" there is now a great crime! This has become the monolithic launch pad for "being educated and credentialed" for far too many of the leaders of tomorrow who cannot distinguish propaganda for fact.

Generations of  impressionable young people beginning in the sixties, have created a vivid false reality which is buttressed daily by celebrities and the media and which causes them not to recognize evil when it stares them in the face.  In this false universe they proceed to elect incompetent poseurs who parrot feel good slogans but who are incapable of solving problems.

All too often their causes degenerate into pseudo-religions because they cannot be defended in either the arenas  of either faith or reason.  Climate change and global warming come to mind.  Both have computer models that omit vital data and all too often are gamed to provide conclusions that fit a pre-established narrative and an improvable therm which in reality is not science  but  dogma.

President  Obama is another example of refusing to recognize the evil that manifests in "Political Islam" based on doctrine emanating from "religious Islam".  He will not acknowledge ISIS as part of Islam and thus deludes himself that he is in armed conflict with Muslims.  In point of fact when questioned if he has put the nation at war with ISIS he even backs away from that as he did recently with Steve Croft on "60 MINUTES".  This coming even as his White House and Cabinet, trying to read his mind, finally stated that the country was indeed at war with the terror state. 

Race, gender, sexual preference, and atheism have also emerged as religious like movements that want to kill their opponents, not convert them.

Political correctness and multiculturalism are the flags that fly over both forms of ignorance.  Reason, reality and rationality are swept away by rigid speech and thought control that can end a career or ruin a life if one violates their always shifting boundaries.  What began as civilized behavior that  people should voluntarily aspire to in the name of decency has devolved into a loss of freedom of the self done in the name of conformity.  It is the path to the gulag.

Woeful ignorance can best be illustrated by the Annenberg Public Policy poll where in a sample of 1,416 adults, only 36% could name all three branches of government.  35% could not name any.  Only 27% knew it took a two thirds vote of the entire congress to override a Presidential veto.  21% believed that a 5 to 4 SCOTUS decision is sent back to congress for reconsideration.  Over 50% could not identify which party was in charge of either House of Congress.  Meanwhile Arizona State Legislator Steve Martenegro noted that 96% of a sample group of High School students in Arizona and Oklahoma failed to pass a sample test on citizenship issues

These are the people who now vote or will vote for those who lead us and on issues which are obviously too complex for them to make a reasoned decision.  We have been "dumbed" down by teachers unions and left wing academics, by celebrities and media icons who both think us stupid and want us to remain that way.  Woeful ignorance leads us to tyranny because we never hear the other side.  Willful ignorance uses its concentrated ideological mass to try and crush the other side.  One form is for the sheep and the other is for the dissenters.

In a world where evil threatens us but becomes confusing because that which it targets is always supposed to be worse than it is, it is no wonder that the logical, pragmatic and moral centers  of our society cannot hold.  The relentless assault of bad education, destructive, disingenuous politics and a toxic culture are  cancers in the body and soul of the nation.

Ignorance of either stripe is not an easy chair by a blazing fire place in the dead of winter.  It is instead a coffin being lowered into the deep, dark, frozen ground.

ERLANDSSON