29 June

One of the things the collapse of our education has created is the misunderstanding of thinking itself. Thinking is a job. Just like plumbing. It has a set of specific skills, that take a long time to learn. It’s what a scholar is, a trained thinker. Ideas without scholarship are lethally dangerous to a society. Nothing kills more people than ideas separated from scholarship. The idea that ‘democracy’ is everybody having their own opinions, which then all add up to a collective decision on things, is destroying democracy. It’s nonsense mostly generated in US culture, which has a fanatical need to believe ‘the people’ run societies. There is no such thing as ‘the people’. Opinion is the death of thought. As the saying goes, opinions are like arseholes, everybody has one. They’re team banners people march under, used to identify and unify a team in battle against other social teams. The anti-EV crowd pretend to be talking about ideas, for example, but it’s all team sports battle from a social group feeling threatened by change. There was a time when thought was a hierarchy in society, when we respected scholars for being the people to follow when we had to deal with ideas. Just as we do for plumbing, flying planes, sports etc. Everything has a hierarchy of expertise and value. Except thought, now. Thought has been replaced with everybody’s opinion. It’s destroying our civilisation, it’s making us lethally stupid.