Book People Archive

The New Dark Ages

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http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/blog.html

The New Dark Ages
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

When I was growing up in a slum in Israel, I devoutly believed that
knowledge and education will set me free and catapult me from my miserable
circumstances into a glamorous world of happy learning. But now, as an
adult, I find myself in an alien universe where functional literacy is
non-existent even in developed countries, where "culture" means merely
sports and music, where science is decried as evil and feared by
increasingly hostile and aggressive masses, and where irrationality in all
its forms  (religiosity, the occult, conspiracy theories) flourishes.

The few real scholars and intellectuals left are on the retreat, back into
the ivory towers of a century ago. Increasingly, their place is taken by
self-taught "experts", narcissistic bloggers, wannabe "authors" and
"auteurs", and partisan promoters of (often self-beneficial) "causes".

Dismal results ensue: the Wikipedia "encyclopedia" is "edited" by anonymous
users with unlimited access to its contents and no credentials; fads like
environmentalism and alternative "medicine" spread malignantly and seek to
silence dissidents, sometimes by violent means; the fare served by the media
now consists exclusively of soap operas and reality TV shows; Reading is on
terminal decline; with few exceptions, the "new media" are a hodgepodge of
sectarian view and fabricated "news"; the few credible sources of reliable
information have long been drowned in a cacophony of fakes and phonies.

It is a sad mockery of the idea of progress. The more texts we make
available online, the more research is published, the more books are
written - the less educated people are, the more they rely on visuals and
sounds rather than the written word, the more they seek to escape and be
anesthetized rather than be challenged and provoked.

Even the ever-sliming minority who do wish to be enlightened are inundated
by a suffocating and unmanageable avalanche of indiscriminate data,
comprised of both real and pseudo-science. There is no way to tell the two
apart, so a "democracy of knowledge" reins where everyone is equally
qualified and everything goes and is equally merited. This relativism is
dooming the twenty-first century to become the beginning of a new "Dark
Age", hopefully a mere interregnum between two periods of genuine
enlightenment.