It's not a question of people choosing to ignore reality, it's generations of conditioning.
For much of our nation's history we had very limited sources of information. There were the church's doctrines, the company controlled newspapers, and word of mouth.
Today it is the very opposite. Still the churches and the company newspapers, but added to that is the vast corporate media. Word of mouth has expanded via the internet to become an overload of information and misinformation.
But through all of our history we have been missing a critical link. We are not being taught how to think. We are wallowing in a sea of words without a clue as to how to sort it all out and make sense of it.
The problem lies at the feet of what we call Education.
In setting out to teach literacy to all of our people(except the blind), we have focused on a process that substitutes down loading stuff into our brains in place of teaching our youth how to think and evaluate what is coming in through their eyes and ears.
And so for generations we have produced young adults well prepared to go to war, sweat in the factories, slave in the fields and toil in the counting houses and produce and raise up the next crop of workers.
On our way home this afternoon I was listening to Susan Boile singing "How Great Thou Art". I got to thinking about all of the hymns of praise. Over and over we eagerly give ourselves over to an all powerful super Being, surrendering our lives and our brains in eternal worship.
We call this Heaven.
In our schools we are taught to sit and listen and recite back that which has been fed into our computer brains. Oh sure, our teachers and our parents say such things as, "Think about it!" or, "Use your head!" But it is not aimed at thinking original thoughts. They mean to think within the confines of the accepted information.
The relative few who survive this conditioning and become free thinkers, do so in spite of their education rather than because of it.
Curious Carl
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