The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
Category: informed electorate
Scrutinize government
I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe … Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. — From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy.
Transparency
The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.
Legitimate concerns
If the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds … its policies would most definitely reflect the ‘legitimate concerns’ of children to have ‘adequate’ and ‘equal’ access to ‘free’ french fries, lemonade, and videos.
Nothing worse
Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action.
Sheep and wolves
A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
The necessity of oversight
We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.
The moral obligation to be skeptical
The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.
Understanding indoctrination
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ‘brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.
Secrecy in government
A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in open market is a nation that is afraid of its own people.