Enlightenment is the duty of each of us

Lord777

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We live in an amazing time of universal accessibility of information: when everyone has a smartphone with access to the World Wide Web at their fingertips, it is difficult to argue with this statement. Even those who do not use the Internet consume information through other, more archaic distribution channels.
On the other hand, a critical assessment of the information consumed is far from a trivial task. As the previous generation fell victim to the advertising of "MMM" and other dubious projects of adventurers, so the current society is kneeling under the pressure of inaccurate information, which slowly but surely plunges us and our loved ones into a world consisting of half facts , and half - from fictions, myths and prejudices, which are bred by narrow-minded evangelists, as they themselves believe, in their "field of knowledge."
The dangers of GMOs, HIV dissidence, government propaganda of homeopathy, conspiracy theories, raw food propaganda, third wave feminism, flat earth communities - this list can be stretched over several screens of text. The victims of all this are two categories of people: the reactionary inert youth, who, due to their inexperience and compliance, easily accept any, the most radical ideas, as well as those who feel the lack of an educational base in the natural and fundamental sciences: physics, biology, chemistry and related with them disciplines.

Consumer Society
Even on the example of our beloved (or not so much) Habr and Giktime, we can safely say that the overwhelming majority of the population are consumers, not creators of information. Even people who have something to say to others prefer to consume content rather than generate their own.
This state of affairs has led to the fact that today less than 1% (or even 0.1%) of people generate content, all the rest are consumers. There are many reasons for this, from insufficient language proficiency to banal laziness.
But while you are silent, your loved ones are stuffed with the inscriptions "Does not contain GMOs" on packs of soda or Elena Malysheva's programs, in which there is already more insanity than medicine.

Materialism is losing
We consider ourselves, for the most part, a materialist society. Even such ancient institutions as the Church, and they recognized the fact that the Earth is round and the cosmos exists. Even they have to adjust to the achievements of modern science and technology, mimicking for their own survival.
On the other hand, we, materialists and adherents of the scientific approach, are swept by a wave of obscurantism and pseudoscientific teachings that are gaining more and more popularity among the population.
Science has become too difficult for the layman. At the same time, the construction of the so-called “rule of law” gave rise to a paradox: if earlier, in an era of rapid progress, when scientists were no longer burned as heretics, one could give up on “non- believers ”in science and simply ignore it, now they have real power over scientists.
Probably the clearest example of recent years is the persecution of the head of the Rosetta project, Matt Taylor, which was started by the journalists of the quite serious publication The Verge.
Feminists around the world began vying with each other to practice eloquence and insult the imposing scientist for his clothes. With all this, Taylor is an exemplary family man (he has a wife and two children), and according to the stories of his relatives, he is a typical person who is passionate and in love with his work. It got to the point that ESA had to organize a press conference where Matt officially apologized for his inappropriate appearance. The fact that he had to apologize for the shirt when he carried out a unique mission brought the scientist to tears.
The feminists' ardor was a little cooled by the counter massive campaign in the media and social networks to support Taylor and ridicule the "offended" by his appearance, as well as the fact that the shirt was made and donated to the scientist by a woman , his girlfriend.
But the very fact of what happened leads to an unpleasant conclusion: the masses that used to stay on the sidelines can now influence the world of science and scientists. If earlier people with a "spark" of madness and genius were directly sponsored by progressive capitalists and visionaries-patrons, then the modern symbiosis of state and business within the framework of globalization does not provide such opportunities. And besides, the connection between the capital and the scientist-sexist / homophobe / nationalist / Islamophobe (underline the necessary) suddenly emerges, the SJW, minorities or other “offended” will bring down all the Egyptian executions on the heads of those involved. And this will have a bad effect on business.
So now people who have created and are creating our world every day have to huddle at the door of this celebration of life, choosing simpler words and shirts. Lenin would have been proud of the current state of affairs: this world, in fact, is now run by conventional milkmaids and workers.
These same people are subject to all sorts of pseudoscientific teachings and theories. And the ordinary adherent of homeopathy or the opponent of the evolutionary theory is unaware that pseudoscience operates only with convenient facts, ignoring all inconvenient ones. It is for this reason, at first glance, that everything is so beautiful and "foldable" there. And there is no point in digging deeper, because questions, contradictions, and other areas of knowledge begin to emerge, in which the average citizen of planet Earth has neither the time, nor the desire, nor, most often, the opportunity due to a weak theoretical base.

War on common sense
While there is a raw food diet abroad and women's rights during space missions and scientific discoveries, the path of least resistance is actively encouraged in Russia.
We do not have a society of noocrats, no matter how much you want, but the average lawmaker is the same average person as a conventional locksmith in your HOA. As a result, inherently criminal bills are being adopted to ban GMO crops, which in the coming decades will throw the country back in terms of food security for years, press conferences of homeopaths gather where they speak with serious "cabbage soup" about quantum dissonance and the excitement of the potential of "life force" a person using sugar candies.
On the topic of the latter, a serious wave has recently swept in the media space, and in both directions. Against the background of the RAS memorandum on the recognition of homeopathy as a pseudoscience, “the whole royal army” was called to defend the latter. It got to a big press conference, where for almost an hour and a half it was told that homeopathy is a new stage in science and medicine, and three dozen members of the commission on pseudoscience are mediocrities and charlatans.
The director of the Evolution Foundation, Peter Talantov, who gave comments to the editors of Geektimes on the latest memorandum of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the preparation of which he took part, made a short video from an hour and a half conference of homeopaths, combining it with a comic project about the hoaxes of musician and actor Sergei Kuryokhin:
It would seem that, with all the modern achievements of science, for homeopaths it was not that it should not have been worth organizing a conference - not letting on the doorstep, but everything happens exactly the opposite.
We found ourselves in a world where more people believe not in the attending physician, but in the responses to "Mail.ru Answers" or women's forums. We found ourselves in a world where the role of the Inquisition was assumed by fanatics of various movements and currents, who endowed themselves with the power to “poison” and “burn” those unwanted by the system. We found ourselves in a world where not a single line of text can be taken on faith without providing sources. We found ourselves in a world where momentary profits and benefits rule, and not development prospects and common sense.
And the momentary benefit says: "obscurantism is a blessing."
Because right now, products marked "Bio" or "Non-GMO" can be sold at 20-1000% more expensive. Because right now you can sell a kilogram of sugar for the price of a business class car. Because right now you can arrange paid seminars on how to cure AIDS with alternative methods, because HIV is a hoax.

Instead of output
The RAS memoranda will not save us - they are only of a recommendatory nature. Everything that is happening around us is only our fault.
We did not take the time to explain to our parents or brothers and sisters that GMOs cannot even theoretically develop cancer. After all, the gastrointestinal tract is a huge acidic cauldron, splitting everything that gets into it into its constituent parts.
We didn't take the time to explain to our children how modern third wave feminism differs from the original women's rights movement - and now their army has been replenished with someone's daughter, for whom Matt Taylor's shirt is more important than space exploration.
We, once tuning in the TV, allowed our family members to watch TV. And now the household believes in little green men and twists foil hats.
We didn't explain to our old grandmother that the microwave was safe because we were in a hurry to go home.
We can only say that GMOs are harmless and even beneficial for the survival of our species, homeopathy is delusional, HIV exists, and a raw food diet is unhealthy. Without supporting their words with facts, unlike the opposite side, let their arguments be based on the “survivor's mistake”. We know that we are right, but we are arrogant and do not even try to convince others that we are right.
Because it will be necessary to explain the principles of quantum physics and chemistry in order to convince another person of the failure of homeopathy. Biology and Chemistry - to explain what GMOs are and how they work. Biology - to prove that HIV exists. We sit silently like greedy dragons on a mountain of treasures called "knowledge" and do not share it with anyone.
Because we are too lazy.
 
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