The truth sets us free

Gagdad Bob helps us understand how Obama happened:

In short, Obama is our first president who wasn't only immersed in the nutty ideologies of the left, but who actually believed and assimilated them -- hack, loon, & sphincter. Somewhere in his development an irony curtain descended on his mind, and the resultant absence of critical distance becomes the gateway to authoritarianism. For the leftist, the closure to reality always provokes the totalitarian temptation. In other words, they know the truth. It's just a matter of forcing others to accept it.

But how about the role of mass media in our lives?

Of the mass media that made -- and makes -- Obama possible, Voegelin wrote in 1956 of "communication as intoxicant": "The spread of media mass communication... can be used as an essential indicator of the destruction of the personality. For only people whose personality is already deeply corroded will use these media as regular intoxicants....

"For me, the worst damage of mass media is not the impairment of 'morality' but the destruction of personality through intellectual confusion and vulgarization. The solution would seem to lie, not in the improvement of mass media, but in the development of alternative occupation for people who nowadays have so much time on their hands."

That's a good point, because the average American fritters away, what, 34 hours per week plugged into the matrix? This means 1) that Americans have an astonishing amount of slack, but 2) that they have no earthly idea of what to do with it.

In other words, the purpose of a liberal education is liberation, not in the modern sense of being liberated from human nature, from standards of decency, and from reality more generally, but in the sense that the truth sets us free, i.e., expands our subjective horizons instead of contracting them via ideology. And all ideologies contract this space, from feminism to scientism to Darwinism.

TV and college: shielding the soul from reality for 60 years.