Tune Forks

The problem is We The People, the population of social media society. "MASS PSYCHOSIS - How an Entire Population Becomes MENTALLY ILL"

How did this happen? A 1985 book by Neil Postman, Manhattan / New York University Professor (Donald Trump's Home Town) predicted all this for America's future. On February 2, 2017 his son Andrew Postman confirmed that Donald Trump was what his father's book was ultimately about.

The Theory of SOCIETAL STUPIDITY by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nazi Germany mass conformity / collective blindness. By chasing too much Bluesky, Twitter, Lemmy, Reddit style of "aging out old content" (yesterday's news), by chasing trends, trending content... and moving too far away from the public library of organized knowledge, by moving too much into "refresh for breaking news / breaking entertainment / breaking images / trending latest content" and away from refining and organizing Wikipedia / Wiki style collaborative common good for all mankind in multiple-languages, connections made to other topics and understandings. Generative AI to avoid copyright infringement on the training material, to avoid citations of source material and authors... creates unique answers to the same question, time and time again it spits out dynamic uncommon ground.

::: ____________
"One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We’re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour. It used to be that the university campus was a kind of hermetically sealed-off area where the news of the day did not impinge upon your attention to the inner life and to the magnificent human heritage we have in our great tradition—Plato, Confucius, the Buddha, Goethe, and others who speak of the eternal values that have to do with the centering of our lives. When you get to be older, and the concerns of the day have all been attended to, and you turn to the inner life—well, if you don’t know where it is or what it is, you’ll be sorry. Greek and Latin and biblical literature used to be part of everyone’s education. Now, when these were dropped, a whole tradition of Occidental mythological information was lost. It used to be that these stories were in the minds of people. When the story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life. It gives you perspective on what’s happening to you. With the loss of that, we’ve really lost something because we don’t have a comparable literature to take its place. These bits of information from ancient times, which have to do with the themes that have supported human life, built civilizations, and informed religions over the millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage, and if you don’t know what the guide-signs are along the way, you have to work it out yourself. But once this subject catches you, there is such a feeling, from one or another of these traditions, of information of a deep, rich, life-vivifying sort that you don’t want to give it up." - Skywalker Ranch California, lessons from George Lucas to his Star Wars audience, summer of 1987. Joseph Campbell at age 83.