The threat of misinformation, conspiracy theory and social media to our democracy

[pbrower2a]

(04-28-2022, 05:25 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(04-28-2022, 02:05 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: From what I have heard, young people today did not have civics classes at all. They need to create their own knowledge of how our government works, and most are too lazy to do that. I don't know just when civics education was abolished though, or how gradually.

I was an adult when this happened, and my ex and I moved her daughter to a private school even though we couldn't afford it at the time.  We were exceptions.  Most parents were OK with this, thinking that school was intended to produce successful workers, not citizens.  So, drop this into the late '70s or a little later (depending on where you lived, of course).  It was a solid 3T precursor and accomplished exactly what the promoters intended.

This tendency created much of the problem. Yes, such people as bond traders and corporate attorneys do well, but how many of them do we need? We need milk, which means dairy workers. We need oil changes if our cars are to last 150K miles and not 40K miles. We need factory workers to make the stuff that we need. We need orderlies in hospitals if the staph infections are not to overpower the efforts of the physicians on the staff.  

I'm not going to romanticize any heroic working class, as such is not my ideology, but it is obvious that people who do the real work can be good citizens and that people who draw the high salaries, earn the professional fees, and churn income as huge commissions if those well-paid people have no civic virtues. It may be that our system is more effective in enforcing good behavior from the proletariat than from the heirs and the executive elites. Maybe the question of social organization is not so much how people do their jobs as it is who gets away with what. 

Let's start with the obvious. Neither profit nor economic gain can never be the sole purpose of human existence. Heroin is profitable. Insider trading is profitable. Slave-trading was profitable.  Swindling is profitable. Outright theft is close to pure profit. This said, any social order in which  crime syndicates have a large share in determining what is possible is far poorer than it needs be. Cronyism and sclerotic bureaucracies will strangle an economy. In case you wonder what happened to Sears, A&P, and K-Mart, which once dominated their niches: they became excessively bureaucratic while still marginally profitable while their competitors were not so bureaucratic. Simply merging the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central Railroad to form Penn Central was not good enough to save them. You can no longer " trust your car to the man who wears the star"... because the bureaucracy at Texaco misbehaved badly.  Corporate bureaucrats had the golden handcuffs that ensured that they did not become competitors or that smart college grads didn't start reading Karl Marx because they were unemployed and sought to blame the system.