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Being Dumb Is The American Dream — Transcript

by Moon · 3,520 words · 549 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00How many books did you read last year?
0:02If you're like 40% of British people,
0:05the answer is zero. And it's not really
0:07like the other 60% are avid readers
0:10either. Even college students whose
0:12entire job is to study aren't actually
0:14reading books. Professors across the US
0:16are teaching classes to students who
0:18can't read full books anymore. This is a
0:21massive neon sign that we're plummeting
0:23towards idiocracy. And soon, kids aren't
0:26going to be able to read at all.
0:28>> So yesterday I came to the realization,
0:31my students can't read. That is
0:34the tragic truth. And
0:38I struggle with being told that I have
0:41to focus on certain standards on grade
0:44level text when my kids are not reading
0:46grade level.
0:47>> 40% of American fourth graders are below
0:50a minimum basic level of reading
0:52comprehension. Test scores have been
0:54plummeting for years, and kids literally
0:56can't sit still in class or understand
0:58basic instructions. It's almost like
1:01there's something distracting them.
1:03>> [laughter]
1:06[music]
1:15[screaming]
1:17>> Mind-numbing, isn't it? Well, this is
1:20exactly the problem. For years now,
1:22teachers have been reporting massive
1:23problems with behavior, making stories
1:25like this all too common. In a comment
1:28on the teacher subreddit, a user
1:30describes their middle school students
1:31in a truly dystopian way. Literally all
1:34my middle schoolers want to talk about
1:36are TikTok trends and memes. That's it.
1:39My school prohibits phones from the
1:40first home room bell to the dismissal
1:42bell. As soon as the bell rings at the
1:44end of the day, they're pulling their
1:46phones out of their bags and scrolling
1:48TikTok as they walk out of the door.
1:50They literally don't know how to
1:51function without it. It's scary. Other
1:54teachers chimed in with their own
1:55similar experiences. We took the kids to
1:58Knott's Berry Farm and they were just on
2:00their phones the entire time. A lot of
2:02them didn't ride any rides. I had
2:04multiple kids tell me their favorite
2:06part was the 5-hour bus ride there
2:08because they got to be on their phones
2:10the whole time. Insane.
2:12>> Children are put on a tablet, they're
2:14put on a TV screen, they have phones at
2:16the right age of 6 and 7. They They
2:18don't read anything, they don't watch
2:20regular TV, they don't see commercials,
2:22they are glued to a screen 24/7 with
2:25instant gratification. They don't know
2:27how to be bored, they don't know how to
2:29use their imagination.
2:31>> Social media has poisoned kids' brains
2:33so badly to the point that actual roller
2:35coasters are less interesting than the
2:37dopamine dispensers in their pockets.
2:39>> Students are not reading anymore.
2:42They're not reading on their own,
2:43they're not reading for class
2:45assignments. I stopped giving
2:47independent reading because students
2:49were just not doing it and were happy to
2:51take the zero or the F or the D in order
2:55to not read the book. So, they were
2:57actively trying not to read anything.
3:00>> Now that the cat's out of the bag, no
3:02social media ban for kids is ever going
3:05to reverse this process. But, the truly
3:08awful thing here is that this was all
3:10planned.
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4:13it might have begun as a side effect,
4:15but it became an intended consequence.
4:18Brain [snorts] rot is just one part of
4:19the puzzle. If unleashing the digital
4:21equivalent of crack cocaine onto the
4:23nation's children wasn't enough, the US
4:25also embraced a system that completely
4:27failed to actually teach children how to
4:29read. Meanwhile, the tech oligarchs have
4:31taken over control of the news people
4:34watch, the social media sites that they
4:36use, and they've even gutted the
4:37education system just when it was most
4:40needed. Put together all of these pieces
4:43and the picture becomes clear. We're
4:45rocketing towards idiocracy. This isn't
4:47the first time the education system has
4:49been designed to suit their own
4:51interests. Public schooling and
4:52education has always had a purpose
4:55outside of actual education.
4:57>> Do you Do you know Paul Gotti?
4:58>> No.
4:59>> Okay, Gotti, I I hope I have his name
5:01right. He was teacher of the year in New
5:03York state a number of years. He was no
5:08uh admirer of the current education
5:09system, I'd say. And he wrote a history
5:12of the education system, which was
5:13extremely interesting. The Prussians
5:15[music] established the first public
5:17education system. And the reason they
5:19did it was because the Prussian emperor
5:21wanted to produce obedient soldiers. You
5:24know, disciplined and obedient soldiers.
5:25Now, that was adopted in the United
5:27States in the late 1800s by
5:30industrialists mostly. All sorts of
5:32rural people were pouring into the
5:34cities to start working in factories.
5:36Their kids needed to be cared for while
5:38they worked, and then their kids were
5:39likely to have factory [music] jobs. And
5:41so the purpose of the public education
5:43system, this is why there's rows of
5:45desks and factory bells and this
5:48insistence on timing was to produce
5:50disciplined obedient workers.
5:52>> Men like Rockefeller and Carnegie, whose
5:54names are still all over the public
5:56education system, weren't purely
5:57motivated by the good of the nation.
5:59They wanted to shape the next generation
6:01to fit the needs of their machines. In
6:04this case, they were men who followed
6:05strict time schedules and who would be
6:07able to work the machines they were
6:09assigned to. Rockefeller is often quoted
6:11as saying, "I don't want a nation of
6:13thinkers, I want a nation of workers."
6:15The results of this philosophy speak for
6:17themselves. Now, however you feel about
6:19Jordan Peterson, it doesn't really
6:21matter. This has been noticed and
6:23discussed by people all around society.
6:25In one of his lectures, Noam Chomsky had
6:27a lot to say about this. First, he
6:29plainly says the same thing. The basic
6:32institutional role and function of the
6:34schools and why they're supported is to
6:35provide an ideological service. There's
6:38a real selection for obedience and
6:39conformity. Let me just tell you a
6:41personal story. My oldest friend,
6:43closest friend, is a guy who came to the
6:45United States from Latvia when he was
6:4615. The first thing that struck him
6:48about American schools was the fact that
6:50if he got a C in a course, nobody cared.
6:53But if he went to school 3 minutes late,
6:55he was sent to the principal's office.
6:57That's ultimately why public education
6:59was instituted in the United States, in
7:01place to meet the needs of a newly
7:03emerging industry. It's not often that
7:05both sides of the political spectrum can
7:07agree on the same thing, but here we
7:09have it plain as day. To change the
7:11fabric of society, they didn't put their
7:13focus on the adults. They targeted
7:15children, indoctrinating them when their
7:17brains were still vulnerable to these
7:19repetition techniques. Every day was
7:21managed like the factory. They taught
7:23them to respond to the bell, to sit
7:24still and work for hourly periods, to
7:27blindly listen to the person in charge.
7:29These feedback loops repeated over and
7:31over again, year after year, changed
7:33society. Fast forward to today and that
7:36education system is still pretty much
7:38the same, only it's been left to rot. In
7:40fact, for decades kids were taught using
7:42a system that didn't actually teach
7:44children how to read. From around the
7:46late '80s to about a decade ago, schools
7:49across the West taught reading using the
7:51whole language system. It emphasized
7:53teaching kids to read by making them
7:55guess the meanings of words or phrases,
7:57rather than by sounding out the letters
7:59and actually understanding the word
8:00itself. Despite being proven as inferior
8:04and inadequate, whole language was still
8:06pushed for decades because it profited
8:08the people selling the learning
8:09materials. It was only a 2020
8:12investigation showed all of this that
8:14the farce finally ended. But, by the
8:16time that scandal broke, an entire
8:18generation of children had already been
8:20failed by it. Some of them are now
8:22adults walking around with high school
8:24diplomas they can't even read. Take
8:27Alisa Audits, a 19-year-old who just
8:29started her freshman year at the
8:30University of Connecticut. She graduated
8:33from the Hartford public school system
8:35last year. The only problem, she's
8:37completely illiterate.
8:39>> Even today, could you read this or would
8:41it take you a long time?
8:42>> It's impossible. I was seeing these
8:43words everywhere.
8:44>> Alicia graduated from the Hartford
8:46public school system last year, but she
8:48says today she is illiterate. She still
8:51doesn't know how to read or write.
8:53>> By high school, she was using
8:55text-to-speech apps to fake her way
8:56through every single assignment.
8:59>> So, if you had an assignment where you
9:01had to write something, you'd open up a
9:03document like this and then do what?
9:05>> I would go here, um, to use the
9:08text-to-speech.
9:09>> It says dictate.
9:10>> Dictate. Yep. I love pizza.
9:13>> This is how you would do your
9:14assignments. If you had to read
9:15something, that's how you do it.
9:17>> Her mother begged the school for help
9:18for years and got nothing but empty
9:20promises. Now, she's suing the Hartford
9:23Board of Education. Whether you believe
9:25her story or not, profit became the
9:27incentive a long time ago for the people
9:29who are truly in power, who have no
9:31interest in educating people. And why
9:33would they want to educate regular
9:35people? They don't need factory workers
9:37anymore. Western nations aren't producer
9:39economies anymore. They're consumer
9:40economies.
9:41>> And that's exactly what happened.
9:43American manufacturing collapsed.
9:44>> Yeah. And they did it all for money. And
9:46they did it all because they were
9:48greedy. They were already rich.
9:50>> All you need to do to confirm this is to
9:52take a drive through any town or city in
9:54middle America. Poverty, deprivation,
9:56and hopelessness everywhere because the
9:58jobs just vanished.
10:00>> They don't care that their grades are
10:04low. They don't care that they're not
10:06reading.
10:07>> [music]
10:07>> And when I had honest conversations with
10:10some of my students,
10:11>> [music]
10:11>> I got the constant refrain that nothing
10:15is going to work for them anyway.
10:17>> [music]
10:17>> They're never going to be able to get
10:18ahead. They're never going to be able to
10:20own a home. They're never going to be
10:22able to raise a family like their
10:24parents and grandparents did. So, why
10:27even try?
10:27>> While this process began years before
10:29they entered the scene, the tech moguls
10:31have been complicit in its completion.
10:34Now, the middle class is evaporating,
10:36and the working class don't work
10:38anymore. Now, regular people are only
10:41relevant as consumers. And to consume,
10:43you don't need any level of education at
10:46all. In fact, it actually gets in the
10:47way of it. The corporations which used
10:49to once workers have moved overseas to
10:51exploit cheaper labor. So, at home in
10:54the US, they've been replaced by ones
10:56who specialize in extracting wealth.
10:58They're gambling companies,
10:59price-gouging grocery stores, and social
11:02media companies as the newest, most
11:04lucrative operations of all. In
11:06Idiocracy, the movie predicts that
11:08entertainment would eventually devolve
11:10into a mess of flashing colors and
11:12slapstick toilet humor. Ow My Balls was
11:15the most extreme version of this they
11:16could come up with. As we've seen
11:18already, it pales in comparison to
11:20modern brain rots. Brain rots ditches
11:23the complicated world building and
11:24context that Ow My Balls establishes in
11:27the first second or so. The algorithm
11:29would just see this as wasted time. It
11:31wouldn't work for the attention spans
11:33it's designed to cater to. We're what,
11:3520 years from when YouTube was first
11:37released? What's entertainment going to
11:39look like in another decade or so?
11:41TikTok's only been around for like eight
11:43years. Well, like any addictive
11:45substance, brain rot has varying levels
11:47of strength. Adults might watch less
11:49offensive, slower-paced, informative
11:50shorts with actual artistic value. But
11:53the real addicts, who are mostly
11:54children, need something a lot stronger.
11:56The social media companies, just like
11:58the tobacco companies before them, know
12:00that targeting new users is really all
12:02they need to do. If they can get someone
12:04hooked, then they've probably got a
12:05lifetime customer. This has been
12:07established for years. A whistleblower
12:09who was interviewed by the Senate in
12:112021 said exactly this.
12:13>> [snorts]
12:13>> Facebook understands that if they want
12:16to continue to grow, they have to find
12:18new users. They have to make sure that
12:20that the next generation is just as
12:22engaged with Instagram as the current
12:23one.
12:25Um
12:25and the way they'll do that is by making
12:27sure that children establish habits
12:30before they have good self-regulation.
12:31>> By hooking kids.
12:32>> By hooking kids.
12:33>> Straight from the horse's mouth. Yet
12:36it's only now, five years later, that
12:38some impotent efforts have been made to
12:40stop kids getting hooked. It's far too
12:42little and too late. The lockdowns put
12:44this process into overdrive, separating
12:46kids almost entirely from their actual
12:48lives and locking them into the virtual
12:50worlds. Then they were just expected to
12:52go back to normal straight after. Gen Z
12:54and older generations are hooked as
12:55well, just to varying degrees of
12:57severity. The problems with reading, as
12:59we saw, goes pretty far up the age
13:01range. It's a cultural shift towards
13:03ignorance and ultimately stupidity, the
13:05very definition of idiocracy. Lots of
13:08people have noticed these changes, but
13:09they don't always see them as negative.
13:11Francis Fukuyama, who many people see as
13:13the figurehead of neoliberalism and this
13:15brave new world we're now living in,
13:17clearly noticed it. But he only goes so
13:19far as to say this.
13:20>> Yeah, no, I think that that's the way
13:22people communicate these days. Uh
13:25uh it's uh you know, through these
13:27little snippets of ideas rather than
13:29whole coherent ideas. And I think it's,
13:31you know, it's pretty important. Um,
13:34there's also, I think, a huge
13:36generational difference because
13:39people in my generation don't think that
13:41way.
13:41>> Really though, it's a great tragedy.
13:43Imagine one person reads 10 classic
13:45books cover to cover, they take their
13:47time to absorb it and let it settle in.
13:49The other person follows the Tai Lopez
13:51method of reading instead, but they do
13:53it for 100 books or 1,000 of them. The
13:55difference is that a year later, the
13:57person who actually reads the books will
13:59probably still remember them. They'll
14:00have at least a vague idea of what
14:02happened, the characters, the ideas of
14:04it. The person who skim reads 1,000
14:06books will probably barely remember any
14:08of it. And even if they do, they won't
14:10have internalized the story or really
14:12gotten the value out of them. You might
14:14have seen those videos online where an
14:15AI voice just describes the plot of a
14:17film. If you have, do you really
14:19remember those films? Did you really
14:21have any emotional impact or any meaning
14:23in your life compared to films you've
14:25actually seen properly? Now you've got
14:27people basing their entire belief system
14:29off snippets of ideas they saw on social
14:31media. Technology drained them of their
14:33ability to focus and actually think
14:35these ideas through, all while offering
14:37the junk food replacement as the
14:38solution to that problem. This is what's
14:41so terrifying about Idiocracy. leads to
14:43totalitarian control. Tech oligarchs are
14:46now literally taking over the sources of
14:47information. They're tightening their
14:49grip on the distribution platforms, not
14:51only with social media and influencers
14:53individually, but also the source of all
14:55content. Like when Bezos bought the
14:57Washington Post years ago and then
14:59stripped of thousands of journalists and
15:01recently began pushing ideas and
15:02articles which suit his own interests
15:04and politics. After Musk took over
15:06Twitter, he has since joked about buying
15:08MSNBC. Larry Ellison, the
15:11multi-billionaire owner of Oracle, is
15:13the biggest culprit. He became a major
15:15stakeholder and controller of TikTok
15:17recently. Now he's masterminding the
15:19$111 billion dollar of Paramount and
15:22Warner Bros. He already had his grip on
15:24CBS. This deal would give him CNN as
15:26well. These people may not be sitting at
15:28the editor's desk telling them what they
15:30should and shouldn't say, but there are
15:32of course certain implications, certain
15:34topics to hit or ignore, and general
15:36pressures towards certain views.
15:38>> Yeah, media capture is about who
15:40actually controls the platforms and
15:43[music] the channels that deliver news
15:45and information to us. And part of what
15:46we're trying to communicate [music] is
15:48that that it's increasingly a smaller
15:50and smaller number of people. That
15:52capture isn't just people buying, you
15:54know, media properties [music] so that
15:56they have it as like a vanity purchase.
15:58It it comes with a real
16:00sense of power.
16:01>> Despite the fact that nobody wanted it
16:03and the vast majority of people scroll
16:04past it, Google has been desperate to
16:06push their AI overview answers to people
16:08such queries. Lots of people explain
16:10this is just one thing tech companies
16:12are doing to justify the AI craze and to
16:15keep the bubble from popping. But as it
16:17takes over and people begin to actually
16:18use it, it creates a dangerous problem.
16:21Google just isn't really a search engine
16:23anymore. It's not just showing you what
16:25you were looking for. It's being a
16:26middleman and their AI is the thing
16:28making contact with reality. The real
16:31information about the world then it's
16:32passing on what it thinks is relevant to
16:34you. Google already controls what the AI
16:37thinks is relevant and what isn't. If
16:39they want to push a certain narrative,
16:40they can subtly leave out certain
16:42details from the AI summaries. As tech
16:44ownership of the media gets worse, too,
16:46they will replace more journalists and
16:47people with AI as well. This is already
16:50happening. Then they can have an AI
16:51emphasizing certain details and leaving
16:54out others in the stories it writes.
16:56Then they can distort that even more
16:58when it comes to people Googling it
16:59later or watching things about it on
17:01social media. The truth of any story
17:03gets hidden behind these walls and while
17:05you still might be able to get to it if
17:07you're determined enough, most people
17:08won't. In fact, thanks to AI brain rot
17:10and idiocracy, they won't care in the
17:12first place. The dictators of old used
17:15to have to burn books to stamp out
17:16knowledge and truth which didn't fit
17:18with their ideology and their worldview.
17:20Future dictators won't have to bother.
17:22The libraries will remain intact, but
17:24the books will be covered with dust.
17:26Nobody will want to read them. Now,
17:27there's a lot of depressing things about
17:29living in an idiocracy. At the end of
17:31that film, when Not Sure figures out he
17:33can't actually go back, he realizes it
17:35doesn't even matter. He found his home.
17:38As the world gets dumber, it doesn't
17:39stop you from being able to get smarter.
17:42Those books that the rest of the world
17:43are neglecting, all that knowledge and
17:45wisdom throughout history is still out
17:47there. That's not going to change. So,
17:49if you can actually protect your
17:50attention span, build discipline, and
17:52actually work through hard ideas and
17:54long books, you'll feel like a
17:55superhuman. Even the tech oligarchs
17:57themselves aren't immune to their own
17:59idiocracy. Musk is probably more
18:01addicted to Twitter than anyone else on
18:02the planet. Mark Zuckerberg's replacing
18:05himself with an AI agent. And as the
18:07world gets dumber, nurturing your own
18:09inner curiosity becomes that much more
18:10important. And if you can do that, you
18:12can be a wolf in a world of sheep.
18:16And thank you FÜM for sponsoring this
18:18video. Make sure to check them out using
18:19the link in the description below.

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