Much has been written about the unhealthy diets of Americans—fast food, snack food, convenience food. That same thing is true, not just about what we put in our bodies, but what we put in our minds. Snippets of speeches, cliched interviews with sports figures, sound bites, political commercials, marketing slogans, news snapshots. This is our diet of information, the diet which generates flabby and uninformed thinking.
We live on the surface of complex problems, believing that’s enough to be able to make the life decisions that face us. We don’t ask to hear the poets or the serious thinkers. The seducers and the demagogues are enough. We don’t ask our leaders what their qualifications are or why they want to lead or how we can assess their integrity. We listen to them tell us what we want to hear.
If we don’t become informed, critical thinkers, we become sheep.
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