If we were to catalog the attributes of our Founders vital to the creation of our nation, love of liberty and courage would likely top that list. Close behind would be a more subtle quality empowered by liberty, that of imagination. It is imagination and its implicit sense of wonder that drives our quest for knowledge and ultimately human progress. Our Founding Fathers had no template for creating our government; they had to imagine it based on the imperfect experiences of prior republics. Imagination is the seed of discovery, the spark that ignites our hunger for the knowledge that was once a common American cause.
But where is that lofty hunger among the most vocal segments of America? Wring the essence out of the Left’s pronouncements and you’ll not find knowledge or wisdom, only snippets of hate and tribal emotion. We may laugh at the inability of the Left to maintain substantive dialogue, but it is a symptom of a deeper dysfunction in our shared society. Our culture is exhausted, adrift because it is losing its anchors of truth and knowledge. Substantive knowledge can indeed be elusive, or just unimportant, if you believe truth to be a relative concept and imagination just something that feeds teleprompters. If you don’t recognize the need to moor yourself to the bedrock of truth, then where is the need to seek common knowledge? In that worldview there is no factual knowledge, only political scripts. Two plus two don’t equal four, that is just a construct of supremacists. There won’t be many rocket scientists coming out of that mob — but we need rocket scientists for human progress. Young minds that should be candidates for the role are being suffocated by the Left. Simply dismissing them as “dumb” ignores the deeper crisis they represent. Their imagination, and the vital self-discovery it inspires, have been cancelled.
How did we reach this point where so many voters, so many Americans, don’t simply reflect this hollow mindset but actually seem to wallow in it? The seeds of knowledge have failed to germinate in millions. Many deliberately avoid embracing knowledge, programmed to treat any substantive question as a microaggression. Pro-Hamas protesters roar “River to the Sea” and just shout louder if asked what river or what sea. Law students scream for “social justice” without troubling to learn what our hallowed blind justice means. They aren’t validated by being right, they are validated by more strident chants from their tribes. We are painfully aware of how formal education, crucible of knowledge, is failing. Our nation’s academic report card is shameful.
But it is too easy to ascribe this shallow mindset solely to the schools that replaced civic studies with indoctrination in tribalism and victimhood. Certainly professors and teachers became the force multipliers for the American-hating leftists who infiltrated the educational establishment. But this cauterization of cerebrums was not begun on campuses. Those minds targeted by woke professors were ripened for the new way of thinking, or rather nonthinking, by forces at work in local communities, homes, and broad swaths of society.
You can find the syndrome in the formulaic, intolerant shallowness of the legacy media and many book pubPexels/Joshua Roberts
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