Illiteracy leads to censorship
By Jon Rappoport
"...intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without
which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist.
From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away.
They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or
suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to
political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view
assent to it from sheer cowardice." (George Orwell, 1953)
When those who control public discourse, in a nation, see
that they are losing to upstarts, that their flimsy ideas are being
supplanted by much stronger ideas from these newcomers (who are actually
traditionalists), the shocked controllers turn to the more direct
strategy of censorship.
In terms of substance, and even popularity, the ministers of
truth are losing; so they abandon reasoned discourse altogether. They
desert this fertile, competitive, and NECESSARY territory. They no
longer debate. They ban.
Among their supporters are crowds of illiterates.
There are many people who, because their education was a vaporous thing, have no interest in the written or spoken word.
The reason is obvious: they can't read.
Their natural impulse is to make excuses. "Who needs books?" "People who write books are showing their privilege."
For these excuse-makers, book burning would mean NOTHING. All that matters is: what slogans should I shout?
For the illiterate, a book is a mystery. How could anyone put
all the words together and write one? Somehow, the author must have a
secret method of downloading the book from an elite source, a cloud, a
machine, a trick in their DNA.
A book, a report, an article, a study, an essay---millions of
people in "advanced societies" don't have a clue. When censorship
tightens, who cares? It's just words.
IT'S JUST WORDS.
Long ago, when I taught school, I had an experience I wish
many people could share. Twenty children in a 10th-grade classroom. No
student was reading up to that grade level. Each student was reading at a
DIFFERENT (sub-standard) level. Time to teach reading. How could it be
done? It couldn't.
Elite societal players welcome illiteracy. They love it. It's
one of their cherished goals. Ignorance is good. More than that,
illiterate people are easy to convince that repressive censorship isn't a
problem. It's just something that "happens."
If you don't have "the right ideas," you should be censored.
IT'S JUST WORDS.
Words are useless "things" like tacks and marbles and crayons and paper clips. Who cares?
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow
the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally
impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every
concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word,
with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed
out and forgotten." (George Orwell, "1984")
At its root, illiteracy becomes a form of reductionism. What can be comprehended, discussed, debated, or reasoned shrinks.
IT'S JUST WORDS.
Illiteracy is more effective than political correctness.
Untold numbers of people can't understand the sentences that are
floating and flying by them every day. They register this by building up
anger. Unfocused anger. They are perfect fodder for know-nothing social
and political movements that requite violence and repression. After
all, they were repressed, weren't they? Weren't they left hanging out in
the wind by their education, their schooling? Now is the time for
revenge.
Along the way, censorship becomes a very good thing. They
were limited in what they learned; therefore, limit everyone else. Why
not?
IT'S JUST WORDS.
There is a sub-text percolating in many, many schools: "All
right, you students, this is your education. We're going to keep you
from learning the language. We're going to hold it back from you. At the
same time, we're going to praise you and push you ahead from grade to
grade. You'll know something is wrong. But you'll accept what we do to
you. It's easier. You'll take a ride through school, and then we'll dump
you out into the world. We're making rebels wholesale. Ignorant rebels.
Rebels without the tools for THINKING. You'll have find a place where
thinking isn't important. Good luck. Here's a suggestion. Find a group
where all you have to do is yell and throw rocks. Learn what to yell.
Demand your right to get EVERYTHING FOR NOTHING. That is all."
Do you want a piece of interesting news? I can offer it,
based on my experience of the past 17 years writing online. The
declining system of education creates a vacuum. And into that vacuum,
writers who do value language step forward, and they do present actual
ideas. This is a large vacuum, so it can accommodate many writers.
They are creating new realities.
And readers show up.
Miracle of miracles.
These writers and readers are the "replacement team." They
are standing in for the colleges and universities and the sloganeers.
They are not censoring themselves or anyone else.
They are proliferating language, not reducing it.
Here is the secret: the history of humans reveals that
language does, in fact, expand. It doesn't lie down and die. It doesn't
wait for know-nothings to catch up. It doesn't wait for anyone. Poets
and novelists and playwrights and essayists find and invent new branches
of word and thought.
Their present is the future. They are making the future every day.
And as far as pure ideas go, no matter how hard some people
have tried, Jefferson and Madison and Tom Paine and John Adams are not
dead yet. Their shaped principles embedded in sentences live on.
If at some point, the entire population of the planet were
illiterate, except for four writers, those four would invent a new ocean
that can't be contained---and somehow, readers would show up.
Perhaps you think I'm describing a kind of magic, and maybe I am, but I'm also giving you ironclad fact. It has always been so.
The Internet may have been invented with machine language,
but the writers who have appeared on it are multiplying their own
language.
They are outdistancing the machine.
They always will.
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