Category: Cultural Intelligence

The ignorance of American voters is something that concerns me enormously. When one looks at the election of Representatives and Senators such as Steve King, Louis Gohmert, Michelle Bachman, and James Inhofe, it is clear that voter ignorance is a significant factor.

Americans Are Dangerously Politically Ignorant — The Numbers Are Shocking
CJ WERLEMAN – AlterNet (U.S.)

The health of a democracy is dependent on an educated citizenry. Political illiteracy is the manure for the flourishing of political appeals based on sheer ignorance.

‘Every shortcoming of American governance is related in some fashion to the knowledge deficit of the public – if only because there is no widespread indignation at policies shaped by elected officials who suffer from the same intellectual blind spots as their constituents,” observed Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason.

Comprehension of Numbers Challenging Global Civilization

Number games people play for survival

Introduction
Enabling disaster through basic mathematical operations
Numbers in play in psychosocial organization
Conceptual clustering and cognitive constraints
Pattern memorability between symbolic mystification and “stretching”
Imaginative depiction of the cognitive challenge
Requisite complexification of imagery to embody greater significance
Creative pretence dissociating numbers from sexuality
Significance of “encompassing” the numbers required for meaningful governance
Boundary pushing by sport, religion and governance
Reframing boundaries to engage with patterns of collapse
References

Common Ground, Common Good

Civil discourse that doesn’t taste like broccoli

Neither a barrage of facts nor a sense of civic duty alone will make people reexamine their positions. As we've learned at The Village Square, civil discourse requires friendship, humor – and irreverence.

Tallahassee, Fla. — In the early 1800s, things weren’t looking particularly good for the American experiment in self-governance. Coming to Washington with differences of opinion natural to a vast new land, early legislators lived and ate in boarding houses that became entrenched voting blocs. Thomas Jefferson wrote that these men came to work “in a spirit of avowed misunderstanding, without the smallest wish to agree.”

Apparently neither human nature nor legislatures have changed much since.

Jefferson’s solution was to bring lawmakers to the White House in diverse groups for good dinner and conversation. Two hundred years later, The Village Square takes a page from his book when we invite politically diverse citizens to break bread at our “Dinner at the Square” series or “Take-out Tuesday” town meetings.

Read full article.

American Socrates

TruthDig, 15 June 2014

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Noam Chomsky, whom I interviewed last Thursday at his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has influenced intellectuals in the United States and abroad in incalculable ways. His explications of empire, mass propaganda, the hypocrisy and pliability of the liberal class and the failings of academics, as well as the way language is used as a mask by the power elite to prevent us from seeing reality, make him the most important intellectual in the country. The force of his intellect, which is combined with a ferocious independence, terrifies the corporate state—which is why the commercial media and much of the academic establishment treat him as a pariah. He is the Socrates of our time.

Continue reading “Chris Hedges: American Socrates Noam Chomsky”