April14_2025

What went wrong in USA society

What started the cascade: ignoring Neil Postman's 1985 book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business".

From there, other important things were ignored.

1988 book "Power of Myth" filmed by George Lucas as a lesson to audiences.

1993 lecture by Rick Roderick analyzing the future to come, concluding much of what Neil Postman had described in 1985 without using any of Neil Postman's or Marshall McLuhan's work. An indepedent analysis that leads to many of the same conclusions.

 

Recency Bias became routine

Twitter, Reddit, Bluesky, Facebook social media all promote fresh content. Streaming memes from many sources, "the latest", "the newest" information first. This cultivated recency bias, a popular topic like a 4 months sports season for Basketball, Football, Baseball, FIFA - would get constant focus and attention, when older ideas like Neil Postman's 1985 book or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's 1954 equation about hate get drowned in the stream of fresh and recent.

Eventually it reached a point where 500 people commenting the same reaction-comments to events was the normal and people were not connecting current events to past teachers (such as Neil Postman and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr) for greater context.

It became a constant focus on desired trees and many similar messages and ideas about those same trees, with resulting context bewilderment when discussions about the "Big Picture" and "Forest for the Trees".

 

Public filibuster

Standing up in sustained focus did not become a recognized need. A type of "filibuster protest" of "Day 7 of 800 days of begging for world peace". Intellectual stands, morality stands, for goodness itself were not seen as needed in the general population.

I have seen it done on the Internet, and get attention, for sports teams and video games:

  1. Every day a drawing until a Wonder Woman game comes out, example of day 100

  2. Another game release: Day 100 of drawing badly every day until Civ 7 is released

 

What I did not see:

  1. Until all abortion rights are returned to women after Roe vs. Wade reversal. Until the Equal Rights Act is approved and in place.
  2. Until Donald Trump is in prison for these specific crimes list
  3. Until MAGA in USA understands fully they were manipulated by Russia / Kremlin in an electric media information war.
  4. Until Hate, Domination, Dehumanization by the wealthy stops being motivation to promote this list of political parties / candidates. Moral reform.
  5. Until Right to Repair and Copyright are reformed so consumers / The Little Guy, has ability to repair and and more power of what they purchase. Less power to extremely wealthy, powerful, music cartels, film cartels, corporations.

 

Not just publicity stunts

But also an underlying education, teaching, learning, FAQ / Wiki style system of organized and accumulated knowledge develops progressively. Using these "day 100 of" attention campaigns to refine ideas, grow mutual society-wide understanding, comprehension on complex problems.

 

Desired Changes in Society Lists

Organized lists of what people desire and discussion on practicality, proposals of how it would work out economically, etc.

Second Bill of Rights from January 1944 I find has been consistently ignored when the topics of housing / rent prices, health care, monopoly corporate power, etc come up. People seem "Amused to Death" and in "Recency Bias" to see that this January 1944 statement had an introduction that practically spelled out the future outcome of Project 2025 / Donald Trump dictatorship.

Saying "Occupy Wall Street was correct in 2011", "we should have stood up and supported this even stronger"
Saying "January 1944 Second Bill of Rights was correct"
Saying "Neil Postman in 1985 was correct"

As a lessons-learned, we are not keeping our eye on the common-cause, tragedy of the commons, problems.