Certainty and Sensation: Glenn Beck, Fox News and MSNBC.

Be sure. Read your books, e-mails and web pages; watch your Fox News, MSNBC and be sure. This is the subtle but brutally persuasive and destructive culture that we live in. We think we know. We are taught to grab onto something and be sure about it. I was watching Glenn Beck the other day, in a family members home, and I was struck by his smug face and general demeanor of certainty. But, not just his certainty: the entire audience looked and acted certain. Then it struck me that the words aren't the indoctrination. It's the certainty.

Most people have heard of classical and operant conditioning (If not, read the links below). Most people know that they can associate two things in their mind. However, what most people don't know is the profound and unconscious power that these principles play in their life. A clever person can use these to associate a behavioral disposition and feelings with a certain stimuli---say  colors, shapes or persons---and then cause that behavioral disposition and feeling almsot whenever they want.

Fox News, MSNBC and their ilk are do this very well. They stimulate dopamine with bright colors and high emotion to stimulate a feeling of certainty. There is a human principle called the availability heuristic. And, it is a mistake of the human brain, which sacrifices speed for accuracy, where what most quickly comes to the forefront of the mind is considered most certain. Emotion, bright colors and other things that stimulate salience---something that causes a person to notice it or feel it more keenly---places it into the human memory more firmly than other less vivid and visceral stimuli and therefore causes it to come into conscious awareness faster and brighter. It creates the feeling of certainty.

Fox News and MSNBC have created and associated this feeling with grammar, certain key words, certain color combinations,  certain intonations and anything else they please. They stimulate, grow and exacerbate the feeling of certainty to epic proportions and then associate it with their choice of political ideas, books, products and political candidates. They do all this without the audience ever know it's being done.

People like what Fox News and MSNBC want them to like; people get angry at what they want them to get angry at; and people do what they want them to do. All the while, the audience is sure that they are correct, when they are being led along like a well trained dog---believing whatever their master wants.

People like Glenn Beck and stations like Fox News and MSNBC are the master of these people. And, the behavioral principles are so powerful that they have reached inside the audiences very soul. And from there, they are shaping our nation by their clever marketing (brain washing). People are voting on spoon fed opinions and on carefully selected facts and taught to be sure about only one source---FOX or MSNBC.

Stop them. They are shaping our nation according to commercial and political interest. Not the interest of gullible nation that voted them in. They are making a sham of democracy by brilliantly wielding psychology. Stations like Fox News and MSNBC change the way voting is done and even the entire culture. We shouldn't limit free press, but we need to stop kind of wholesale manipulation of the people. Right now we have less choice than a person in China. Our restriction is just less obvious.

Politics isn't a normal institution. It wields the greatest nations. It shouldn't be treated like a normal institution or group. So, in order to stop the manipulation, we need to limit the amount of information candidates are allowed to announce. They shouldn't announce that they are running. There should be third party, highly watched, watchdog sites and sources that list the qualifications of the candidates, and keep their names private---like education, grades, experience (filtered), finances, Ratings of general charisma (for diplomatic reason), net worth (within a range), IQ and other cognitive test and any other useful and on point category 

We should eliminate dichotomous labels like democrat and republican and make it about actual qualifications and not cookie cutter categories. By doing this, we have eliminated the power of someone like Glenn beck or stations like Fox News and MSNBC. People are not voting on labels they are voting on actual qualifications without the colors and emotion.

Bush, Palin, Obama and Hillary: The Same in Change: Changing The world and Getting out of a Paradox

A fox, a chicken, a bag of grain and the smelly old farmer,  who owns them all are on the side of a river bank. The farmer wants to get to the other side with all of his possessions intact. But---he can only cross with one of them at a time. Considering he's got a microcosm of the food chain at his feet, how does he cross without loosing one possession to another? How does he cross without losing the chicken to the fox and the grain to the chicken?  Most adults have a very hard time solving this riddle. Why? Because, they are forward thinkers.

We think about solutions as linear in time: We complete step 1, we complete step 2 and then step three, and then we get our final outcome, the solution to our problem. And, we never go back to step 1 or two. Now, many direct problems are solved with this forward thinking; however, many problems cannot be solved like this. The crossing problem certainly cannot. And, many of our most important political problems cannot. Watch the news, or  listen to political conversations in school, church or Starbucks. They all have one thing in common: they are forward. Consider the political debates of our time: Immigration, Social Reform, and market fluctuations. We build a fence for immigration, we add to existing systems in social reforms, we stabilize the market with more money. All of these are forward thinking. We see a problem and we add to it.

But, like in the riddle, we keep ending up with the same outcome. Something always gets eaten. Immigrants are starved, murdered or get across anyway; The poor get poorer and the rich get richer or the poor get more dependent and everyone gets poorer; and, the market absorbed more money, and then again goes through it's boom and bust cycle, and people continue to get a fortune or lose a fortune. It seems like we are living in a paradox: If I take the chicken first, then I either have to leave it with the grain or the fox when I go back for the grain or the fox. If I take the fox or the grain first, It is the same.

So what do we do if what we have always done isn't working--although many would Americans would say, "it does work!". But, that is only because they are too uneducated (or watch too much FOX news (it is so entertaining)) to realize that western nations (and China) are build on the failures of other people. We use our most impoverished because they are willing to do necessary but terrible work; we use 3rd world nations because they strip their nations wealth for us cheap because their officials are corrupt and their people desperate; and we use other nations as dump sites for our toxic waste, so we don't have to see it's effects and affects and we make a dime off of it while we are creating "Cancer Villages". And, even our middle class in America keeps fluctuating, losing their houses and malnourishing their children because they can't feed their children nutritious foods.

So, what is my proposed solution? Go back. We need a fresh start. There will always be the fox, the chicken and the grain, but we can go back and figure out how to keep them separate and thriving. We'll always have those who easily get power, those who are easily taken advantage of and the resources in-between. We have to get across the river, though, and move through time to a better place. We can't cross the ambiguous waters where the change of movement allow predators to thrive unchecked and feeders to eat themselves out of their only supply of food. The people, those who are the thinkers, the dynamic moral thinkers, usually the educated middle class, those who can see both sides of the bank and all that is in-between, need to solve backwards.

We've been working building on systems that are hundreds and thousands of years old. Now, we need to look to our sociologist, philosophers, psychologist, ecologist and maybe some of the best economic theorist, and look for a better system of doing things. We need a better design, one that is not based on a predatory system, like unfettered capitalism. Instead of building on these old systems--politics, current financial systems and educational systems--we need to start a new.

Politics needs to be eliminated. We should not choose our leaders like we choose between Coke and Pepsi. We should develop system of leadership that puts the best people in the best positions without compromising representation. As a starting step, we should not allow a person to be chosen based on appearance, charisma, or unlimited funds. Instead, we should find a way to allow the public to choose based on principles that are more valid. For instance, all leaders to be elected should should have their entire life laid bare in all things relevant--like financial history, academic writings and college transcripts. Instead of limiting political ads as they are, they should be eliminated. There should be a way to post information about political things that is completely without the flash and manipulation.

Also, until the education system can fixed there should be a special series of classes for voters that is based on the best educational theory, one researched by our brightest minds, that helps people learn basic valid reasoning, like recognizing fallacious reasoning, and psychological principles, like how easy the mind is to persuade and in which ways; and, also, how to operate in the new system of voting, where you have only writings and other appropriate materials to show what the candidates are like. Everyone who wants to vote should be required to have these classes and made so that no matter what ones situation, they can easily take the class.

We need an entirely new system and as a nation and as the world, we need to discover what things we need to change piecemeal and which things we can change immediately and completely. Politics, as it is, can be changed almost completely--Now. It needs to. Economics and education may need to be piecemeal. But all of it needs to change in synch with one another. And, it needs to happen in a generation, lest others forget the movement.

Education, Philosophy, UNF and Sarah Palin's Front Porch

All of us have had the experience of being frustrated and clueless in our first philosophy class---if not for most of them. And, lets not forget the terror of a dropping GPA . To many, philosophy is as punished, as obscured by past personal failures, as math has been. This is a terrible crisis. It seems like just another cliche, but this is a cliche that needs to change because effectively teaching sound reasoning is probably the simplest and most effective solution to cleaning up our squalid political world--and setting the foundation for a better  future.

If philosophy is the path to sound reasoning, and sound reasoning is the method to a better future, then it should also be that philosophy has been subjected to the best research in learning theory, and that the classes that teach philosophy are arranged so that even the mediocre IQ can manage to learn to think with the best thought-technology around. It should be arranged so that learning sound reasoning is an accessible, manageable and personally profitable process. This is not the case now.

Philosophy is taught using text full of old words, old syntax and cultural backgrounds that are no longer salient. Professors  have to either ignore or teach all the background necessary to understand philosophical principles, hundreds or thousands of years of it, in a single semester---and then teach the important principles themselves. Students are left with their heads spinning and many if not most are filtered out of philosophy, all together.Philosophy has become an elitist discipline, with only those indifferent to grades, or those highly motivated, or those who are intellectually gifted or all-of-the-above making it through even a minor successfully.

The text and the language, they have a huge part to play in the study of philosophy, and they definitely should be introduced---slowly and consistently. This is one of the great strengths of the UNF philosophy department: they introduce the literature well. However, there needs to be a large scale move to make philosophy universal. Philosophy, of all the academic disciplines, is the most important for a thriving society. It is the great measure of sound thought. Which is of great need in all societies, but especially in such societies that vote people into office based on slogans, like "flip, flop", and on posters with pleasant pictures like HOPE. We, as a democratic society, have sold ourselves to the decore of the political arena, where car salesmen dressed as leaders determine the salience of political debate. Since I've studied philosophy, every year people become dumber because I see past there flash, quickly. we need an entire nation, a world, of people who see past the flash---a world of philosophers. At very least, we shouldn't let our college students get out of school without being compelled to vomit after watching C-span, or having the ability to see past the glare of bright colors, catchy slogans and the raucous of political collective-monologue.

I was walking through the UNF campus last semester, and it suddenly occurred to me that these students are the best our nation has to offer. They're the university students. Most of our nation doesn't have university degrees. At very least, these people, the minority educated class, should be able to reason soundly. However, listening to even philosophy students about to graduate, makes me realize: we need to do way better. Listening to everyone else makes me want move to Alaska---the part that even Sarah Palin can't see from her front porch---build a shack and give up on the world except for the periodic angry letter and manifesto mailings. But, then again, that sounds like the Unabomber, so guess I'll take my chances with city life.

http://www.back2college.com/gpa.htm