Moonlanding Denial on the Increase
Bill Whittle says that the number of young people who deny that the moonlandings ever took place is on the increase.
Had I written such a thing in a science fiction story, no one would believe it. No one would believe it because everyone, or almost everyone, mistakes technological progress for the progress of civilization, which means, philosophical progress.
In reality, they have little or nothing to do with each other: Soviet Russia was able to put first a satellite and then a man in space faster than the West, but on a philosophical level, they were more primitive than Genghis Khan of the Mongols, more bloodthirsty than Acamapichtli, the first Aztec emperor.
In reality, you can have a generation wired into an Internet, the most astonishingly deep source of information in history, and yet without the educational or intellectual capacity to integrate that information into a coherent world view, without a respect for and an attempt to practice philosophy, in other words, they are peasants.
They have no desire to exercise the intellect, and rightly so, because the academics and intellectuals they meet, the minds the world holds up to them as thinkers of deep thoughts, are poseurs, men who utter utter nonsense and paradox and jabberwocky words: Marxists and materialists and nihilists for the most part, who either do not believe in the mind because they do not believe in the free will (Marx) or who do not believe in the mind because they believe men are meat puppets controlled by self gene molecules (Materialists) or who do not believe in the mind because they believe are beliefs are unbelievable (Nihilists). And the arrogance of their poseurs is particularly appalling to the younger generation, because deep down everyone at some level knows that truly wise men are humble, like Socrates, who knows he knows nothing.
Here is the video. Hear it and weep.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
