Ramped Ignorance
Last month, the Associated Press broke two "groundbreaking" stories in rapid-fire succession. One headline all but screamed out the stunning revelation that "Scientists Say Men, Women Not Alike." Before Americans could begin to absorb the implications of this discovery, they were bombarded by another AP shocker: "Study: Parents Can Affect Teen Sex."
Now I am pleasantly surprised whenever well-paid researchers draw the proper conclusions from their social "data," and journalists, in turn, relay this information to the public without the usual bias. But still, after reading these incredibly absurd headlines, I wondered: just how ignorant have American intellectuals become, that they need to spend millions of dollars on research to confirm what most of us know anyway? To tell us basic truths about relations between the sexes which any good parent should have instilled in us as a matter of course?
Well, the answer to this question is fairly simple.
United States
United States
A chart showing average monthly welfare benefits (...American intellectuals have become ignorant as a result of such mass media. If you read the kind of social science revelations the New York Times has been publishing since the 1960s, you begin to see why an uneducated simpleton like Forrest Gump struck so many Americans as a fount of wisdom.
Seemingly, the more educated our society becomes, the more ignorant they appear. Still, if American intellectuals are imbeciles when it comes to the basic facts of life, just how, exactly, did they get that way? To me, this is baffling. And while countless books published in the last decade have shown the depths to which the American intellectual has sunk, the question to why our society has evolved this way has not been made less than apparent.
To illustrate this circular, self-reinforcing process, is the one and only welfare system, as an irresponsible young woman might go...