I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

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Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions; churches, companies, tax-collection schemes and what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture, yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual, we understand the felt presence of experience is what is most important. But the culture is a perversion; it fetishises objects, it creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrely religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanise themselves by behaving like machines; processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood.

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