Modern Society is Hell Bent on Making You Dumb

In a recent LinkedIn social media post entitled, “Do Social Mathematics, not Social Media.” SOUMEN S. starts with the observations that “Google made us dumb by hiring smart engineers. Facebook made us jealous. LinkedIn made us charlatans.” And he ends with this remarkable paragraph:

“The point of this post is that modern society is hell bent on making you dumb. The cheap money driven marketplace is flooded with bullshit jobs (more than 50%) with long hours. Then you have daily struggles like commuting, politics, mortgage, lack of exercise etc. Living is a struggle - it is meant to be so that you cannot think. Save yourself by doing recreational mathematics.”

I agree with the critique of modern society given by Soumen Sarkar. If Soumen were just a bit older, he might have recalled that even rock singer Frank Zappa demonstrated that modern society is hell bent on making you dumb. In the song “Valley Girl” a middle verse says, “On Ventura There she goes. She just bought some bitchin' clothes. Tosses her head And flips her hair. She got a whole bunch of nothing in there.” Under the dome of modern society, shopping is allowed, but not thinking.

I also agree that clearly seeing any truth, even the simple truths of mathematics, shows that thinking is enjoyable. Any thinking reveals the rational nature of the soul and mind and partly frees the soul and enlivens the inner life.

But I am more radical. Modern society is hell bent on making you dumb for a reason. Modern society wants to tell you who you are and tolerates no questions, no thinking. Sooner or later, a thinking person is bound to ask basic philosophical questions “Who am I?” and “Why is there being at all; why not just nothing?” Modern scientist Richard Dawkins tells us who we are and suggests a way to live: “We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” Talking about how to live, Dawkins also contradicts himself and says, “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” By saying that we are blind robots controlled by our smallest parts (the genes) Dawkins denies free will and replaces it with biological materialism. Saying that we alone can rebel, Dawkins contradicts materialism and suggests that human beings are more than machines. I suppose that Dawkins could say that his blind faith in the intrinsic spiritual value of rebellion is just another fanciful mirage programmed in by his own selfish genes.

For people seeking to understand who they are, I recommend turning to thinkers who have thought deeply about the world and themselves: thinkers who pierce the artificial dome of modern culture and truly believe that human beings have rational thought, free will, and the capacity to love. Books such as Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antione St. Exupery, and The Great Transformation: How Contemporary Science Harmonizes with the Spiritual Life by George Stanciu.

The book the Great Transformation (https://www.amazon.com/Great-Transformation-Contemporary-Harmonizes-Spiritual/dp/B09GJFZ6QL) starts with “Like you, I was born in the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hindu mythology, when all the great religious faiths of the world are on the wane. The secular faith in the Nation-State, in grand schemes to institute Paradise on Earth, and in placing transcendent hope in human institutions has been destroyed by history. No theoretical arguments are necessary to show that the goal of a Heaven on Earth is perverse and that the pursuit of such a goal leads to untold death and destruction, to a Hell on Earth for tens of millions. The sight of the rubble of Hiroshima, the smell of burning bodies in Auschwitz, and the sound of frozen corpses thrown on sledges in the Gulag destroyed secular faith. A technological utopia, a Master Race, and a classless society are nightmares from the past, only believable to a handful of science-fiction writers, to a few crazy ideologues blind to history, and perhaps to one or two drunks in bars near Harvard and M.I.T. Secular faith is dead, and religious faith is stumbling toward the graveyard.”

Later in the book The Great Transformation, Stanciu explains that unlike animals, we humans do not have complete instincts telling us how to live. There is no instruction manual for human life. But unlike animals whose world is like a small, poorly furnished room, all that exists is knowable by the human spirit. By observation and reason, humans can discover how to lead a happy life.

Reason can extricate us from the tangled web of lies told by modern society. Reason can apprehend the great givens of human life. Starting with mathematics is a perennial admonition to those who desire to proceed to philosophy. Plato’s Academy had written over the door, “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter.” Soumen Sarkar’s advice to “Save yourself by doing recreational mathematics,” is not just clever hyperbole. His advice is a good way to start to understand who you are.