May 25, 2021
To Fight Back, Question Everything
By J.B. Shurk
The world is so plagued by contradictions right now that I sometimes find myself quietly mouthing the opening sentences of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (and I bet I'm not alone in this admission). In terms of safety, health, opportunity, and prosperity, there has never been a better time in human history, but hardly anyone living anywhere is celebrating. Barack Obama sold "hope" on his march to power, but Black Lives Matter and Antifa preach only despair at every turn. An American government invested in projecting strength abroad stokes fear at home. It has never been easier to acquire knowhow of almost any kind, yet ignorance runs amok. How is this even possible when humans have never had greater access to information?
Before the printing press revolutionized mass communication in the mid-fifteenth century, nobody owned books. They were prohibitively expensive secret stores of knowledge possessed by a tiny percentage of monastic scribes and wealthy elites (many of whom were illiterate themselves). Within fifty years of Gutenberg's invention, more books were produced than during the previous thousand years. Still, just two hundred years ago, almost ninety percent of the world couldn't even read or write. Now almost ninety percent of the world is literate, and most of us walk around with little computers in our pockets that, along with an internet connection, allow us to retrieve almost every word that has ever been written about almost anything. If knowledge is priceless, and almost anyone can now scoop it up with the tap of a screen, we live in the golden age of universal wealth.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/to_fight_back_question_everything.html
