Some Americans have a new fetish: ignorance… (a 2-part series)

Ignorance gone viral, the death of personal accountability, and the successive gradations of epistemic failure in our conversation.

Never before, it seems, have people worn their ignorance like a badge of honor as they do now in our social media ecosystem.  For many, it seems “cool” not to know something.  Like it was in high school, only the “sell-outs” study or research an issue.  Being willfully ignorant is today’s version of “sticking it to the man!”  It is as if knowing something about anything betrays your inner nerd.  Ignorance has taken on a persona of its own; there is a deeply narcissistic and prideful quality in its public manifestations.  

Choosing the right word is so 1990s… or should it be the 1890s?  In 2017, conversational immodesty is hip and edgy; the sexual currency of our conversations are word-gasms.  In the orgy of social media, people compete in order to see who can produce the most promiscuous, sluttish, and loose string of words possible.  Being true to the cause means that you don’t dare attempt to ‘make sense’; coherence, logic, and evidence is for losers, geeks, and goody-two-shoes.  

There can be no greater proof of our fetishism of ignorance than the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency.  While Hillary Clinton’s language was lifeless and nauseatingly predictable, perpetually cagey and utterly flavorless, Trump is the virtual porn-star of an orgy of ignorance and ADHD.  Hillary represented a style of speaking that had been in its death throes for a while.  The beautiful irony is this: while her stance was presented as a string of politically hypoallergenic talking-points, it became the anaphylactic equivalent of a speech-allergy millions of Americans had developed from overexposure to the politically-correct drivel that has been sweeping our nation.

When Trump speaks, it is like watching someone set knowledge on fire.  His language is a frenetic, mostly monosyllabic word-salad; the conceptual equivalent of a talking Frankenstein.  While Hillary’s speech symbolized a linguistic mausoleum of calcified PC-tropes, Trump’s language is an epistemological conflagration of civil discourse and droves of his supporters could not care any less.  The same orgiastic word-minions, for whom ignorance is their new family crest, are those who hear him as the voice of their anger, fear, and resentment; the very things that drove them to the polls to deliver Hillary her shocking defeat.  

Where does this go from here?  Stay tuned… part 2 coming to timeline near you soon.