SolitaryWalker
Tenured roisterer
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2007
- Messages
- 3,504
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 5w6
- Instinctual Variant
- so/sx
Well-intentioned external censorship of this nature can only be justified to the extent that its role is restricted to informing consumers of the nature of said information, so that people may choose to ignore certain sources of their own free will and control the environment in which their children are raised. Things like the V-chip or rating systems are examples of this.
The question is do we treat the people in question as children or as responsible, self-sufficient adults. Your suggestion seems to be that the latter is more appropriate than former. My question to you is why? They cannot take care of themselves. Their lives are complicated by even the most basic of tasks that require independent thought and decision making, such as for example how we should respond to Dennett's book.
Dennett is certainly in favor of treating people like rational, self-sufficient human beings. He exhorts them to think for themselves and that is part of the reason why he does not want them to believe in absurdities. What he is doing is forcing them to become adults or to take responsibility for their actions and their worldviews into their own hands. He insists that they should do so by pursuing the truth and avoiding self-deception. Unfortunately we are at a time where people do not want to think about the truth, nor personal responsibility. They are not prepared to carry the weight that he is burdening on their shoulders. They wish to be coddled like children and become irate when this comfort is denied them. They resemble the infant screaming in agony when exiting his mother's womb. It may be said that it is inevitable that the infant will exit sooner or later, therefore it is senseless for us to try to protect him from such pain.
Dennett thinks that it is inevitable that these people will be forced to cease being ignorant, hence they are in the same position as the aforementioned infant. We know too much, the cat is already out of the bag he says. I beg to differ, my proposal, I think, shows that it is both possible and desirable for us to keep the simple folk ignorant. In short, the proposal is to cease publishing works that discuss new discoveries and the historical in public venues. This will doubtlessly divert the public attention away from such things and they will gladly cease thinking about them. They are uninquisitive by nature and will have few problems forgetting about what science and philosophy has taught them in the past if they are not reminded of it anymore. Hence, whilst Dennett's claim that we know too much may be true, it is not a substantial problem. Whatever it is that the simple folk know can be easily forgotten by them.
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In one sentence, my question to you and Dennett is why should we treat those people as adults and share the knowledge of the truth with them. We certainly do not want to break the spell of Santa-Claus to small children, why should the simple, ignorant folk be any different?