Our cultural illiteracy is our inability to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed judgment, and critical agency. It is a social formation that extends from the mainstream broadcast media and Internet to a print culture, all of which embrace the spectacle of violence, legitimate opinions over facts, and revel in a celebrity and consumer culture of ignorance and theatrics.
Literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science. Thinking is now regarded as an act of stupidity, and ignorance a virtue.
Chris Hedges is right in stating that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture.”
Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a relationship to a commodity or a reductive notion of self-interest.
We don’t love each other, we love our new car. Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence.
This has been a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.
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