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Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The End of Dogma



The Network of Dogma, FOX, will change, and I think it will be noticeable in about 2 to 3 years. The network presently has a plan which casts it in the role of the Baltimore Cathechism (if you had gone to a Roman Catholic grade school, you would be familiar with it). There is an endless repetition of banal dogma. That is not an enduring posture to have.
Certainly, there is a great deal of the Repetitive & The Banal in the written word, also. It is something I assiduously try to avoid, although not always successfully. Most people that have some sort of beliefs that they wish to share with the rest of us tend to leave little to our imaginations: they force feed us the whole schmear, and they do it at annoying length.

If you want to teach somebody, if you wish to mentor, if you wish to set an example, you have to let the reader or the viewer exert a good deal of effort and come to the conclusion themselves. This business of spoon-feeding opinions is gruesome and smacks of electro-shock therapy to me. My mother was listening to Rush Limbaugh yesterday and I had to excuse myself and leave the room. I cannot bear having some guy on the radio yelling at me with all his facts and analyses and insights. Can... not.... stand... it!

This approach is a child's approach to didacticism: having been tutored by deficient teachers ourselves, we adopt their annoying methods to try and persuade others.

I am quite convinced that one cannot spoon-feed important insights to people. They have to be "midwifed" to their own conclusions (the method of Socrates). When this has happened, the mind has actively reached it own conclusions, and it has expended a bit of time and effort; the mind has something invested in its logic and conclusion...
A notion which a person comes to on their own is more... delicious!... than the endless array of  tidbits set out for tea by the Politician Mad Hatter and the Religious March Hare!

Forced fed dogmas are the stuff of people who can no longer think, but only fight for causes foisted upon them by the individuals from whom they derive their permissible mental lives. FOX will only endure in the form in which Roger Ailes created it if the future is so broken that all of us require a prosthesis where our brains used to be.

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