The Dumbing Down Of America

I have been bitching for years about the population in the US….that they were getting dumber and lazier with every new generation….I have pointed to the popularity of reality shows as an indicator of the dumbness part and then to gadgets like the Salad Shooter, or the egg cracker and the battery powered whisk……and as much as I have bitched….I want to believe that it is just NOT so……but…….

The Repubs have been accused as part of the dumbing down process because of their education stands,,,,,this from Truth Out……

The Republican Party, particularly the rabid Tea Party-influenced majority in the House, is embarked on a juggernaut to take the public out of everything it can in American life, including libraries, elementary and high schools, government workers, environmental protection, even parks and parking meters.The combination of privatizing public services, and thus making them less affordable to the vast majority of Americans, and lowering the wage scale for workers fortunate to have a job is making this a two-class nation.

As much as the GOP and the TP are seemingly attacking education…..the population is not helping either…..why?

From a piece on opinionated.net……..

I sometimes envisage the television set silently and invisibly sucking brain cells and synapses out of my brain the minute I switch it on. I imagine that the longer I watch, the more of my brain matter is methodically extracted. I guess this is just a fantasy, but I really do believe it does indeed make you stupid.

Ways TV Makes You Dumber

• TV puts you in a mild trance-like state where your brain shuts down and is left unchallenged (I’m pretty sure there have been studies that have shown that TV does have a hypnotic affect on the brain)
• It rewards you for doing nothing, sort of like a drug, and that can’t be good for you
• It’s a passive activity, non-interactive, so watching TV is something that is being done to you, not with you, again leaving you completely unchallenged.
• TV usually panders to the lowest common intellectuall denominator
• It efficiently and all-too-often takes the place of activities that could potentially expand our intelligence, such as conversing, reading, or project undertakings
• Television is intimately tied to advertising and consumerism, so the goal of most programs is to promote capitalism (through commercials and actual program content), and not to represent reality. TV often distorts reality and manipulates meanings in a way that benefits advertisers. Since we have a tendency to believe what we see on TV, our minds are susceptible to being influenced in a way that benefits advertisers and promotes the goals of consumerism, which is often at odds with intelligence.
• TV pushes upon us the erroneous mindset that if we only buy a certain product or service, we’ll be happy. Furthermore, and even more damaging is that this implies that if we are not currently satisfied or happy, then there must be something wrong with us. This is a horrible state of affairs, because as the Buddha so elegantly put it, life is suffering. There is no escape from suffering, and the sooner we accept this, the better off we’ll be. I remember this one commercial I saw for an over-the-counter pain reliever that claimed to be “one more step to a pain-free life”, implying that life is supposed to be pain-free!

In George Leonard’s book Mastery, Leonard explains that TV shapes our thinking in a way that makes us believe that the outcome is more important than the process, that everything can be achieved, resolved or wrapped up within a specified and short period or time. Again, this is a bastardization of reality. Life simply does not work this way. Most things aren’t black and white. And most things that are worthwhile do not take a half hour or hour to achieve. He explains that both TV shows and commercials present viewers with an unrealistic rhythm of life where problems are encountered and then resolved by the end of the commercial or show, and that it is one climax after another. So watching TV distorts our perception of reality, which makes you less intelligently equipped to deal with the real world.

Our minds are further warped by constantly watching beautiful people enjoy wonderful lives, called the Beautiful People Syndrome by Ron Kaufman (http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/commentary/syndrome.html) Thus we tend to erroneously believe that our lives ought te be filled with goodness, perfect looks and perfect lives, and that if we don’t have this, then there is something wrong with us.

Here’s an interesting tidbit of info from http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=805412: Scientists did a calorimetric test to determine energy consumption while watching TV. What they found surprised them. They found that on average people watching TV consumed ten per cent less energy than normal resting energy consumption. That’s right, you actually consume more energy sitting there doing nothing than when you are watching TV. There is a simple explanation. It seems that this is due to the concentration people exert while watching TV reducing the amount of fidgeting and random movement people do. While fidgeting may be a major part of one’s resting energy use, thinking uses up energy, too. The neurons in the brain aren’t very good at holding their own energy for long, so glial cells in the brain constantly transfer energy to the brain cells, energy taken from the blood. So if you keep your body steady but try solving a differential equation, you’ll probably find yourself losing more energy than while sitting and doing nothing at all. Of-course, TV excites neurons in the primary visual areas, but perhaps that’s, on average, as far as it goes . We may lose less calories watching TV because we’re not using our brains to think, only to watch.

The population is getting dumber and dumber and they can point to politicians, but ultimately it is their inaction and their mindset that is the most destructive……when they find hunting alligators or dudes cutting down the last of the old growth forest or a bunch a rich self centered housewives less appealing then what is going on around them….then they will get to the point of an idiocracy!  It is fast approaching!