 Welcome to another edition of Thinking Things Through, Critical Thinking for Critical Times. I'm your host, Michael Sukoff. We are pleased to have with us today, Jay Fidel. Hi, Michael. Thank you for having me on. Let me answer the definitive question here. The answer is no. Maybe we're done now. No, you stole my thunder, but no, we're not done. Is there anything you'd like to add briefly about yourself or about think tech before we start? No. Okay. And in the interest of full disclosure, it was because of you that this show, Thinking Things Through, is on the air. So thank you very much. Absolutely. Okay. Jay, as you and many of our viewers and listeners already know, Thinking Things Through seeks to provide a forum for thinking critically about important issues in the world today. And we seek to do this by exemplifying ways of looking at and thinking about these issues from alternative, more critical perspectives. This includes learning how to question the ways in which these issues often are presented to and frame for us by the mainstream mass media and on social media. So let's get right to the part of the matter. As we already said, the topic today is the U.S. electorate ready for November, and why don't you start us off, Jay? Is the U.S. electorate ready for November? You already said no. What do you mean by ready? Can we count on them in the election? Can we count on them to make rational choices? Can we count on them to be engaged on the issues? Can we count on them to vote at all? Right. So it sounds like you're talking about broadly speaking civic engagement, which includes voting and all the different kinds of behaviors that are associated with voting, such as knowing enough about the issues, knowing who the candidates are and where they stand. And I think... That's pie in the sky. You know, you remember, what was it? Jay Leno used to have this man in the street piece on his late night talk shows, and he would ask people, you know, who the vice president is or who the secretary of state is or the capital city of a given state or any number of things that should be obvious to an engaged person in the electorate. And more often than not, they would not have a clue. It's not just, you know, that they know the issues. It's not just that they know the candidates. It's that they... Do they know the world around them? Are they sophisticated enough to put the information that is beamed at them together so that they can make choices about the world in which we live and want to live? And the answer, I think, is no. We had a show just now about social media just a minute ago. And we were talking about John Fabro, who is a surveyor, used to be a speechwriter for Barack Obama. And he's... Somebody pointed out that he's also an actor. But what is interesting is he conducted a survey of a bunch of young people at a table, which is his job as a surveyor. And there was a camera on them, and he asked them, are you going to vote? And to get this lukewarm answer, it wasn't clear that any of them were actually going to vote. Do you know the candidates? Not clear. Do you know the issues? Not clear. And they were just so wasted on being informed, being ready, if you will. That's what your question about what does ready mean. Ready means walking into the polling place or dealing with mail-in ballots and having some clue about what you're going to do. And one of the points made was that they were a generation that did not have a clue, and they walked into the ballot, the polling place, or handled the mail-in ballot, if at all, without knowing what they were going to do. And they would sort of take a whiz at it. And let's see. This is a familiar name. And that sounds right. And bottom line is they're not ready. And furthermore, actually, Michael, they're not going to be ready because here we are in September. Some people have already voted or are about to vote, and voting at any event is very close. And how are you going to prepare to use that term? An electorate of 330 million people in a matter of 60 days, and the answer is, no, sorry, you can't. Right. Well, I'd like to dig a little deeper with you on this issue and talk about why things are this way. What are the reasons for this lack of engagement, for this lack of knowledge, for this what you call being wasted? I would use a different term. I would just say lack of knowledge and lack of interest. Apathy is usually the term that's applied to this phenomenon in sociological discourse. Why do you think? How have we gotten here? Why? Technology. Television has changed. Radio has changed. Newspapers have declined. Reading, reading, that's not a technological thing, but reading has declined. And social media has emerged as a sole source for many tens of millions of people, especially including young people. And if you look at that, if you stand there on the street corner looking at it for six hours a day, you have your phone out wherever you go, then you are not getting real critical thinking. I'm sorry, Michael. As much as you want to see critical thinking at every corner of our world, sorry, it's not there and people aren't getting it, and they are latched on to their social media. You watch movies on Netflix, and Netflix, and Prime, and you watch these movies that are made today, 2022, or for that matter, during the more active era of COVID. And you see the movie is often, and I mean often, based quickly around the phone. There is a phone in every scene. There's a phone in every communication. There's a phone in every passage of information. It's so interesting how phones have taken over our lives and our interaction with each other. And likewise, they have taken over in terms of communicating mass information to us. It's very scary how little information we are getting out of the phones. Okay. Well, I want to continue to dig a little deeper on this. So what I'm hearing you say, one of the main points you're making is this is a problem of technology and the advances in technology. But what I want to ask you is, is it only a problem of technology? Or is there something else going on with us as human beings that has lent ourself to be so absorbed in all these different kinds of technology? Have we lost something of ourselves in this process? I don't know how it was 100 years ago. I would like to think 100 years ago, people were more engaged that they understood at some level of your cortical brain that we were involved. We are all involved in a community, an agreement that the government we have is a workable government, a social safety net, not in the term of disadvantaged people, but a social mesh that we are together in this and that we have chosen this form of government. And we need to abide by it and work on it. And we need to treat it with some respect and care. Right. I don't think we have that anymore. I think we've abdicated the notion of working together in a society. I think there's so much negativity happening. I think there's so many people who have dropped out. And there's a lot of things in American history that take us down the path to where we are now. But where we are now is not where people agree that they are part of. The government is us and we are the government. And we live in the greatest country in our none of that. We don't have that anymore. We don't have the rule of law. We don't have a belief in democracy or in Congress. Certainly, we don't have a belief in the Supreme Court. And we don't have a back-hitter branch or the agencies. Well, so to go back to your example of the survey or the focus group, and by the way, I did watch that was very interesting. To what extent do you think the reasons that you're giving now may be at least part of the reason why these young people are so disengaged? Oh, I think it's a failure. And the largest element of that is it's a failure of education. No teacher, no teacher ever inspired them. No teacher used the term critical thinking. And if they used the term critical thinking, they did not explain critical thinking. And if they explained critical thinking, they did not give them examples. They didn't take them down the syllogistic path of how you get from facts to conclusions and so forth. And so they really don't understand what you're talking about on this show. I hope this show reaches 330 million people, although it's not likely to. I think we lost our opportunity in the educational system of this country. Maybe post-war, post-Vietnam, where you sit in a class and you learn and you're tested. And you're not looking at your phone. You're not out in the playground smoking weed. You're actually trying to learn stuff and make the world better. Now, some people get to be professionals. They get to be leaders in industry and all that. They're really smart. They go to the best schools, get the best grades. I'm not saying there's nobody. I'm just saying we need an electorate. The way it works is people vote what they could vote in tens of millions. And we have in this country, half the electorate as indicated by presidential election of 2016 and 2020, half the country is ignorant and unable to engage and understand the difference between fact and fiction. Okay. Well, I'd like to take us back to this issue of education, because as you know, I am an educator. I've been in the classroom. I've taught undergraduates in some upper division undergraduates, but I've also been very involved with, you know, radio work and this show and active in other areas. And I mean, I agree with you. We do not have an education system in this country that teaches young people or any people to think critically. And what that means is not just to regurgitate facts from a lecture hall that has four or 500 people, that has its place, but to be able to think through issues by questioning assumptions, by asking, well, what do you mean by this? And to, you know, question the information that's coming at us all the time. I don't believe we, overall, we have an education system in this country that prepares young people to be engaged citizens. So I agree with you, that is part of the problem. Now, it's one thing to acknowledge that as being part of the problem, excuse me. It's another thing to talk about what do we do about it? And that's a much longer conversation. But, you know, I believe in what's called critical pedagogy, pedagogy just meaning teaching, okay, critical pedagogy of the exact kind that I was just trying to explain, where students and anybody learns how to think about things and not just receive information, because there are a lot of assumptions that are packed into the information that's presented to us. Unless we know how to recognize those assumptions and start to ask questions about them, we can't be informed citizens in a democracy. We can't really be an informed voter. What do you think? Sorry, you know, I'm thinking of law school. I'm thinking of law school, where the teacher will make you stand and state the case. And I haven't read the case, it's going to be visible to him and everybody in the room immediately. He is going to ask you to ask him questions. He's going to ask you to argue with him. Now, you know, everybody says that lawyers, you know, lawyers can take both sides of the case, you know, they train to do that and they are trained to do that. You have to be able to do that in our legal system. But the experience of learning how to do that is valuable in the sense that you have to ask questions and you have to be able to answer questions. You have to be able to take a position or not. I don't think that method takes place in other circumstances. What I mean is in, you know, in grade school and high school and generally in college, it's 300 kids in a big room and they're just writing those as feverishly as they can, so they can regurgitate in the final. That's not educated. You know, years ago, we criticized China for just teaching facts, teaching and propaganda to students and asking them to regurgitate and if they did well in the regurgitation, you know, they got good grades and all that. Right. And we said, that Chinese don't know how to really educate. We here in the United States, we know how to educate. We know how to make them think creatively and so forth. And that's why we're the leader in the world. Well, you know, fast forward and they're the ones who are doing the thinking now and we're the ones who are doing the regurgitation now and we can re-maintain our aspiration of doing creative thinking when we are not teaching kids to do the creative thinking. The problem, of course, in China is that they don't do the creative thinking in a political sense, in an ideological sense. You have to follow the propaganda or bad things will happen to you. In the U.S., we could do that, but we don't do that and we have so much misinformation that kids are so confused about it. They don't know which end is up, but it's not just kids, Michael. No, it's not just kids, you know. We are being battered, as you say, we're being battered with bad information all day long and we're not asked to test it. We're like sponges sitting there and we learn what the channels are telling us. Then we get a lot of ads and I think some people learn the ads better than they do the content. You can tell you what Skyrizi is in Rinvok and drugs, whatnot. Bottom line is that it's an elegant and important and critical human function to do critical thinking and we aren't doing it. We're not teaching them and the whole education system has forgotten about it and has not kept up with the world. The world has changed. Even in Europe, they know and they care about these things, but we don't. Well, I think one of the issues here is what priority do our government officials and our elected representatives give to funding the educational system. As I'm sure you know, ever since the late 1970s, public education has been consistently defunded. When I went to college, I went to the University of California Berkeley. I had done some junior college before that, which was free. When I got to the University of California Berkeley in 1972, you know how much tuition I paid per semester? $212. Look at what tuitions are today. This is largely because our governmental priorities have shifted away from providing for a good education. To me, it's no surprise that we have people who are disengaged who don't know how to think critically and are massively misinformed or disinformed. The other thing I would point to as we start to wrap up here is what's the role of the media in all this? When I say the media, I'm not just talking about social media. Of course, you've already pointed to the prevalence of that and its overwhelming nature and how people have accustomed themselves to technology. But what about the role of the mass media? I'm talking about MSNBC, CNN, all of these major media platforms. What role are they playing in providing the kind of information and the forum for critical thinking that is essential to a democracy? I don't see it happening. And then the question is why? Well, some media try to be straight. I think MSNBC tries to be straight. They don't always succeed, but they try. I think Fox News tries to be crooked. And they are corrupted. They're corrupted by their own bottom line. They're corrupted by their leadership. And they're never going to give it to you straight. It's all misinformation. And the problem is a lot of people watch it because from a social psychology point of view, they need to watch it. They want to watch it. It's more entertainment. Entertainment is what it is. And in various other media on the spectrum, Newsmax and other example, Sinclair Radio, terrible. On the other hand, if you look at BBC, which to me is the standard, the old fashioned classical news story, pretty straight. And I think we have to get back to that. The problem is that it's a capitalist world. They have to make money. They have to sell SkyRizzy and Rinvok and all those and Tide and Downey and whatnot. They have to sell that and load you up for every five minutes of quote news and quote, there's five minutes of that. And it really throws the message off. When we come back, when we come back. Yeah. And here we are talking about butchering and butchers. And let's take a minute and talk about Tide and Downey. What? What kind of message is that? This is all social psychology. And the fact is that when people are finished with formal school, however valuable or not valuable that was, they're most of their education through mass media. And if the mass media doesn't do its job, and a lot of these mass media are intentionally not doing their job, we have a population in electorate that is not prepared to vote, not prepared to participate in collaborative government and the social safety that binds us together. To me, this is a problem that goes to the core of our democracy. And we could spend another whole show talking about what is democracy and what do we mean by it? There's a contradiction here between. It'll be a nostalgic show after November. Well, I don't think any unfortunately, I don't think any of these issues are too important to become nostalgic only. But my point is that there's a basic contradiction between living in a truly democratic society and political culture and living in a capitalist system. Because the fundamental principles of those two can be seen as being at odds. Capitalism is about profit, mostly corporate profit. And democracy should be about, I believe, citizen participation in the decisions that affect us. And as long as we do not have a media that's responsive to the public interest. Remember, the airwaves belong to us, the people. But they're rented out to corporations and other private entities to use as they will. The question would be, are they using those airwaves in the public interest? That would be another whole show. But in closing, I just want to come back to the original question. And let's just briefly say, why are all these problems important? And what can citizens of Hawaii and the US, how can they make a difference on these issues? Because these seems to be critical to moving forward in our country and in the world today. What do you think? When Ben Franklin walked out of Independence Hall, Liberty Hall, in Philadelphia, a woman stopped him and she said, Dr. Franklin, Dr. Franklin, what kind of a secret was going on in their deliberations? Dr. Franklin, Dr. Franklin, what kind of government can we have? You've heard this. And he answered her. He said, a republic madam, if you can keep it. And even at the outset, they knew, all of them in Liberty Hall, they knew that one of the issues was whether we, the descendants of Ben Franklin, can keep the brilliant structure that they thought they set up way back then. And we're at a crunch point. Can we keep it? We're not doing much of a job about that. I think the social psychology that applies to the country today allows for a cult, a cult figure like Donald Trump to pull the rug out from under whatever is left of the safety net of the social compact that has held the country together all this time. And I think we're really at a critical point. So yes, it is important. November is important. And if we have people running the government who are incompetent and lie, we are going to pay a terrible price, not only conceptually as the nation as a republic in Ben Franklin's term, but also individually, every single one of us to lose rights, human rights, legal rights, to lose the ability to function together under the three part three branch government that those guys set up is going to have a huge effect on every single one of us, including the media, including you and me, Michael. So I am greatly concerned about this question of whether the electorate is ready. I don't think it is. And I don't think it's going to get ready in the next 60 days. And God knows what will follow. Well, Jay, I agree with pretty much everything you're saying. I just want to emphasize that education is key here. I'm talking about education on all levels of our public life. Let me add that to educate somebody, you have to work at it. You have to get them in a classroom. You have to get his attention. You have to relate to him not only as a member of this 300 class group, you know, you have to relate to him as an individual person. You have to you have to build an architecture in his mind or her mind. And that takes a whole lifetime of education. We can't do that in 60 days. No, I have to probably can't do that in four years or eight years. It takes a generation at least to do that. Hitler knew how to do that. You know, he created a whole new school system in the early 30s where he trained every every kid in Germany had to follow him and his propaganda. It took quite a while and he knew about that. Well, obviously, we do not want to follow his example. And I think we have to start from here and now we as informed American citizens have to make sure that education once again is one of the top priorities in our in our government spending. And until we can elect people who are willing to push for that, it's up to us, the people ourselves to organize ourselves to make the politicians do it. So on that note, I want to thank you so much, Jay, for joining me. It's been a wonderful discussion. And I hope you come back sometime. This has been thinking things through critical thinking for critical times on think to how tech Hawaii. Thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at think tech Hawaii dot com. Mahalo.