There are a few significant flaws in our culture that keep us from enlightened understanding of what’s really going on in the good old USA and the world at large:
1. Lack of understanding history and being able to spot trends and connect dots. Many of us only have the limited scope of history taught to us in high school, which was heavily Eurocentric. Few have a clue how other cultures evolved, or what trials and tribulations they endured. We will have to repeat many of our historic flaws over and over until we learn them by rote and repetition.
2. Lack of respect or access to broad formal, classical education that directly teaches philosophical concepts like morality, ethics, good and evil, logic, reason, passion, psychology. We now prefer a more streamlined approach to learning. We have advanced degree inflation, specialized college proliferation, and student impatience. Students want to bypass humanities electives and take only courses key to their specific professions.
Classically educated people who have refined and sharpened their raw thoughts through the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Descartes, Voltaire, Kant, Blake, Shakespeare, and the gang, often don’t understand why they are not understood.
Many of the educated think all they have to share are the nutshells and senior-year summative notions in philosophical debates to make their points understood. However, the unschooled who haven’t received the setup, the prerequisites, the background gist to these core philosophies will not have the cognitive receptors necessary to receive and comprehend summative statements. Thus, the uneducated cannot simply be told stuff. You can’t give them fish.
One can’t be told the way to Kansas City. One must find Kansas City for oneself. Walking brings more enrichment than an airlift. There’s no substitute for lengthy university-level humanities edification. Even a Buddha must spend years thinking of nothing in order to reach enlightenment. Unfortunately, the humanities, along with art and music, has been combed out of too many school curriculums as inconsequential .
3. Lack of investigative curiosity about current affairs. Too many Americans “turn on” the news. They have a half hour to spare. They’ve been conditioned to stay informed through soundbites. They listen to what is directly told to them, like baby chicks who devour flown-in predigested meals. Too few dig for news. Too few know where to look to find unbiased reporting. Too few take the time to read the longer articles or watch the lengthier documentaries. As a result, we now have conflicting opinions regarding objective news.
4. Too much blind faith that everything will turn out OK in the end which instills passivity and acquiescence in the face of oppression. We lack appropriate levels of cynicism, pessimism and doubt. Whatever happened to questioning authority? My son thinks it’s the fluoride.
5. Seriously diminished interest and ability to read deeply. See Flaw 2.
6. Inability to distinguish between the Good and the Greater Good; egocentric apathy toward the greater good when it requires sacrifice of the good. Our communal spirit has been dampened by the instilled belief that our neighbors in need are actually freeloaders. Loathing of the poor and the non-productive is on the rise. More and more blame is being placed on their lack of motivation rather than their lack of opportunity.
7. When the going gets tough, too many don’t get going — they look for easy outs, shortcuts, and back doors. There are more poor and non-productive people in America who lack the motivation to fight their way to the top, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophesy that justifies their loathing by the people in Flaw 6, which negatively impacts those sincerely struggling to find opportunity.
8. We’ve disconnected words from their meanings. Blatant lies have become an acceptable means of communication. Gross exaggeration and over-simplification are mainstream vehicles. Anything goes and nothing really matters when making promises and claims.
9. Too much xenophobia; too little exposure to other cultures. One need not travel to foreign countries to study different cultures anymore. Today foreign exchange students from our cities could attend a year of schooling in our rural villages and vice versa. Our country is so divided these days that it’s easy to find cultures unfamiliar to our own within our own states.
10. Consumerism. If we don’t consume, our economy dies. Our economy is overgrown.
People are being convinced that they need the unnecessary. From beeps and smart brakes on new cars down to toothpaste and aftershave, we have come to accept the optional as the essential. New pills are introduced weekly that are touted as essential to a quality life and potentially quite deadly.
And 11. Lead pipes, nutrient-free food, test-based education, media manipulation, lobbyists, and this Top Ten List, like the diffuse propaganda sprayed as a thin mist over television, newspapers and the internet, are all working together to keep us stupid and weak.

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