by Guest Author Stefan Schindler
“Fascism ought more rightly to be called corporatism, since it embodies the fusion of state and corporate power.”
Benito Mussolini
“That’s how wars start. Politicians lie to journalists, then believe what they read.”
Karl Kraus
“America’s flag should be a skull and crossbones.”
Mark Twain
To manipulate, ignorate, stupefy, distort and deceive – such is the primary function of America’s mainstream news media, political establishment, and compulsory system of miseducation. George Carlin declared: “That’s why they call it the American dream. You have to be asleep to believe it.”
The Weapons of Mass Dysfunction employed by the national security state and corporate elite have also infected America’s colleges and universities. How else to explain the explosion of high-paid bureaucrats, the implosion of student minds, a 50% faculty of adjunct teachers with slave-labor wages, the astronomical rise in tuition, collective student debt now more than a trillion dollars, and the graduated lunatics who assume positions of political power?
Gore Vidal once observed that in the United States of Amnesia, “words are used to confuse so that citizens vote against their own best interest.”
Recalling Plato’s cave parable, Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.”
Noam Chomsky adds the koan-like conclusion: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.”
Did I use the verb “ignorate” in my opening sentence? Yes indeed. We have the word “educate.” Why not “ignorate” – especially if it names the fundamental rot at the core of American politics and culture?
Of course, not all graduates are historically illiterate and ethically warped. Great teachers, informed writers, astute students, ethical businessmen and women, brilliant artists, morally authentic political activists and office holders – they are by no means absent in American society.
From William James and Mark Twain to I. F. Stone and Martin Luther King; from Mother Jones and Emma Goldman to Hellen Keller and Dorothy Day; from Woody Guthrie and Lenny Bruce to Dalton Trumbo and James Baldwin; from Sam Cooke and Muhammad Ali to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan – the United States has always had its politically enlightened rebels. Of course, they don’t agree on everything. But they are independent thinkers, and they do follow in the footsteps of Thomas Paine.
Nevertheless, their ideas are mostly drowned-out by the blizzard of epistemological confetti blown relentlessly at the American populace by mainstream news, ubiquitous advertising, and pseudo-“conservative” talk radio. Result? An American economic apartheid more egregious than the Roaring Twenties that led to the Great Depression and World War Two.
What is to be done?
In addition to dismantling the American empire – the largest empire in world history, with a thousand military bases scattered across the globe – we can start by integrating “ignorate” into our educational and collective vocabulary, as a way of diagnosing the linguistic poison that more or less began with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, was perfected and championed by Newt Gingrich, and climaxed in George W. Bush and Donald Trump, generating the divisive sophistry that went unchallenged and was silently sanctioned by Republican Lite (i.e., the almost equally soulless Democratic Party).
In addition to “ignorate,” we also need to employ the word “interbeing.”
Interbeing names the socially relevant discovery of quantum physics: All things are thing-events, and all thing-events are interconnected, interdependent, interpenetrating. To be is to interbe.
This was illustrated by Chief Seattle when he said: “What we do to the earth we do to ourselves.”
Interbeing was also long ago affirmed by Socrates, Jesus and Buddha when they said that what we do to others we do to ourselves. Hence they recommended a pragmatic path to the Peaceable Kingdom by the individual and collective practice of the Golden Rule at the heart of the Torah: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
If we commit to moving in that direction, we could inaugurate an educational and political revolution that would light the world.
Bio: A graduate of Dickinson College, guest author Stefan Schindler taught philosophy, psychology and religion for 40 years at institutions of higher learning, including The University of Pennsylvania, La Salle University, Berklee College of Music, and the Boston and Brookline Centers for Adult Education. Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon. He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts.
1974. Does it seem like a long time ago? A whole different era—before omnipresent computers spying on everyone, before killer drones, before ISIS? Well, maybe.