Beck: A Big, Big Part Of The Problem

From Billy Beck:

"These lessons must be learned, else these long-term cycles of ignorance and panic will eventually claim everything we are. It might, in fact, be too late to prevent that. Combining the Obama administration with American cultural demographics (the rise of the imbecile, reared in proud ignorance at the feet of government) makes that prospect all too real."
- me, already

"Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism."
(Rasmussen)

It's naturally an important consideration that the poll did not identify ("did not define") capitalism or socialism. It is, however, more important to me that there may actually be no way to abstract and convey to the rising demographic the necessarily reality-referential concepts denoted by those words. (Balko: "The younger demographics are even scarier.")

It is very important to understand that these are not reasonable times, and reason is the only hope of imparting to anyone the categorical differences between them and what they mean in all their implications. Mindless mass surrender to regularly cynical pleas for "bi-partisanship" alone short-circuits any sort of thoughtful analysis of, say, the moral differences between capitalism and socialism (of which economics is only consequential), and this is not to even touch the rampant corrosion of what passes for education at the government's hand.

In brief, the times call for incision and precision of thought on scales and to depths for which American individuals are haplessly mal-prepared better than ever before in their history: requiring them to cognitively connect everything that their ethics and politics are about -- not as some grab-bag of hazy metaphors, but as a matter of the fact that principles have real-life consequences whether anyone knows it or not -- and actively figure out whether they really mean what they blubber off the tops of their heads whenever some presstitute gets in their face with a microphone.

Or every time they decide to vote.

"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

How is it going to be possible to hip "the younger demographics" to what that means?