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Dumbing Down Quotes

Browse 39 quotes about Dumbing Down.

Dumbing Down Quotes

“It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles.”

“In the natural sciences, some checks exist on the prolonged acceptance of nutty ideas, which do not hold up well under experimental and observational tests and cannot readily be shown to give rise to useful working technologies. But in economics and the other social studies, nutty ideas may hang around for centuries. Today, leading presidential candidates and tens of millions of voters in the USA embrace ideas that might have been drawn from a 17th-century book on the theory and practice of mercantilism, and multitudes of politicians and ordinary people espouse notions that Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others exploded more than two centuries ago. In these realms, nearly everyone simply believes whatever he feels good about believing.”

“We're seeing the world through a prism now; digital capitalism has refined the algorithm to monetize out attention. Peace, contentment, nuance, subtlety, cooperation - all of these things are list as algorithms filter our online communications for maximum engagement. What holds away, of course, is hyperbole, shock, outrage, sensationalism.”

“The Archons use 'mind control' techniques. This is known as psychological warfare, but Archontic manipulation far surpasses anything the United States, Russia, Vatican City, Israel, or the United Kingdom has, of yet, invented. The Archons are the ultimate brainwashers. The Archons keep people distracted with pornography and drugs, with sports and alcohol, with material possessions, exotic vacations, artificial reality, addiction to various pleasures, along with dreams of the artificial technological paradise of: radical life-extension, transhumanism, nootropics and Brain Computer Interfaces. The Archons do this so that humanity does not have the time or opportunity to observe what is really happening in the world. Humanity is under siege. The Archons want you to be as uneducated and uninformed as possible. They destroy your passion for learning, and infiltrate and sabotage the educational system. Ultimately, they want to destroy all that makes you human, your hopes, your dreams, your joys, especially they want to destroy your spirituality.”

“The cosmos stands amazed at just how dumb Planet Dumb is. With an uncanny talent for error, humanity has at every crossroads taken the wrong path. Humanity is the species guaranteed to choose wrongly. What else would you expect in a Dunning-Kruger world? Ignorance reigns supreme. Everyone is part of the Dumbageddon Conspiracy.”

“Am I oversimplifying here? Yes. Is all our media stupid? Far from it. Were intelligent, valuable things written about the rush to war (and about O.J. and Monica, and then Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson, et al.)? Of course. But: Is some of our media very stupid? Hoo boy. Does stupid, near-omnipresent media make us more tolerant toward stupidity in general? It would be surprising if it didn’t. Is human nature such that, under certain conditions, stupidity can come to dominate, infecting the brighter quadrants, dragging everybody down with it?”

“When you allow society to be designed by irrational, unintelligent markets, and capitalists who will do anything to turn a profit, what do you expect? Fifty percent of teens feel addicted to mobile devices. They can’t put their smartphones down. Their devices are like an extra limb, or vital bodily organ. But smartphones are in truth dumbphones. They produce an inability to focus, to concentrate, to pay attention ... the prerequisites for intelligent, considered behavior. They are not social devices, they are anti-social. They generate a lack of empathy, lack of quality human relationships, an epidemic of snarling, disgusting trolls tormenting every victim they can find. Smartphones are transforming all aspects of human behavior, and not for the better. Who is doing anything about it? Who is empowered to do anything about it? No one at all. Anyone who tried would be branded a fascist. That’s why these things have to play out to the bitter end. The cataclysm inherent in them is sure to unfold since there is nothing to stop it.”

“Everybody is in your business, gossiping and being mean spirited. It's different. Sometimes I'm like, "Do I want to do this?," because it's not about the art anymore. It's a struggle. There's part of me that wants to share my gift, which is art, and if I don't, am I taking away something that the Creator gave me to share? At the same time, I don't want to be a part of feeding the dumbing down of society.”

“Those of us with a microphone who are blessed with the gift of being in the public eye have a special opportunity to give voice to all those groups whose activism is sometimes ignored or put on the back pages with the the dumbing down of television and the tabloidization of journalism. As Ralph Nader called it, "sound barks," not even sound bites.”

“And I can see that everything about this God has been purposely designed to poison our experience of life on earth, not to enhance it, to keep us fearful, to suppress knowledge, to curtail freedom and creativity, and to celebrate death. It's nothing less than the sanctified dumbing-down of the human race. And demanding respect for it is frankly an insult that deserves to be repaid with considerable interest.”

“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

“Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago.”

“No one can know how long this dumbing-down of American religion will persist. But so long as it does, citizens should probably be more vigilant about policing the public square, not less so. . . . [Y]ou cannot sustain liberal democracy without cultivating liberal habits of mind among religious believers. That remains true today, both in Baghdad and in Baton Rouge.”