Education
One reason I got the education I have managed to get, both in school and on my own, is that I was shafted. I think all of us who went to public schools were. I don't blame the teachers, far from it. They don't write the K-12 curriculum. I think most of us are aware of a dumbing-down of America. One can see this clearly reflected in most TV
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Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by
the nose. The good work which our philological experts
have already done in the corruption of human language
makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should
never be allowed to give this word a clear and
definable meaning. They won't. It will never occur to
them that democracy is properly the name of a
political system, even a system of voting, and that
this has only the most remote and tenuous connection
with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course
must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's
question: whether "democratic behaviour" means the
behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that
will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could
hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be
the same.
You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if
you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name
they venerate. And of course it is connected with the
political ideal that men should be equally treated.
You then make a stealthy transition in their minds
from this political ideal to a factual belief that all
men are equal. Especially the man you are working on.
As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction
in his thought the most degrading (and also the least
enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to
practise, not only without shame but with a positive
glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by
the magic word, would be universally derided.
The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a
man to say I'm as good as you.
The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus
induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a
good, solid, resounding lie. I don't mean merely that
his statement is false in fact, that he is no more
equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and
good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean
that he does not believe it himself. No man who says
I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if
he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog,
nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to
the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim
to equality, outside the strictly political field, is
made only by those who feel themselves to be in some
way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the
itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an
inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.
And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents
every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it;
wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every
mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No
one must be different from himself in voice, clothes,
manners, recreations, choice of food: "Here is someone
who speaks English rather more clearly and
euphoniously than I -- it must be a vile, upstage,
la-di-da affectation. Here's a fellow who says he
doesn't like hot dogs -- thinks himself too good for
them, no doubt. Here's a man who hasn't turned on the
jukebox -- he's one of those goddamn highbrows and is
doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God
all-right Joes they'd be like me. They've no business
to be different. It's undemocratic."
...Under the influence of this incantation those who are
in any or every way inferior can labour more
wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to
pull down everyone else to their own level. But that
is not all. Under the same influence, those who come,
or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually
draw back from fear of being undemocratic. I am
credibly informed that young humans now sometimes
suppress an incipient taste for classical music or
good literature because it might prevent their Being
Like Folks; that people who would really wish to be --
and are offered the Grace which would enable them to
be -- honest, chaste, or temperate refuse it. To
accept might make them Different, might offend against
the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair
their Integration with the Group. They might (horror
of horrors!) become individuals.
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