Kennedy Gone Mad
I just watched a YouTube video of a debunking of an interview by Joe Rogan of RFK Jr.. It was a great reminder of what I respect and don’t respect in human thinking. It has long been a head-scratcher for me when you hear MAGA people denigrate liberals for being over-educated elitists. I was raised to believe that education was not just a good thing, it was a necessary thing and a thing to be placed ahead of many other priorities in life. Education was not only the great propellant for the prosperity of humankind, it was a necessary part of human development. I was raised by a mother who bootstrapped herself from a first-generation immigrant farm in upstate New York, where education was simply not a part of the program beyond basic reading and writing to an Ivy League education, obtained on a self-induced and self-financed basis. My mother changed her stars by giving up a lot of things otherwise available to her in favor of studying at Cornell University. What that study did was send her into the ranks of the New York Welfare Department and then the Rockefeller Foundation, only to cause her to decide that she needed even more education to accomplish her goals so that she returned to graduate school in her mid-forties with three children and no husband in tow and got her Doctorate degree at University of Wisconsin. There are many good things that came from that drive for education. She certainly improved herself and her position in life as she rose to become a U.N. diplomat that worked tirelessly to improve the lives of many people around the world. But mostly what she did with this drive for education was imbue her children with an unfailing belief in the value of education such that we and our children and our children’s children are driven to educate themselves and thereby advance the human condition.
I really do believe that education improves the human condition in many ways. I have often observed that educated people are better able to grapple with the complexities of modern life much better than not. Let’s face it, life is getting more challenging and we are faced with two paths that we can each take. One path embraces the complexities of life and seeks rational and informed ways to face those challenges. We generally call that the scientific path. The other path is the one where we hold our head and realize that we cannot keep up with those complexities and details and we reject them and yearn for the good old days when life was simpler and more understandable to us. We wish for simplicity, both in our lives and in the answers we grasp to the challenges that modern life throws at us. This path probably has many names for it, but I am currently thinking that the crack-pot path is as good as any.
This alternative, non-scientific path has been on full display at the highest levels the last few years thanks to Donald Trump. He has become the epitome of a person who could not handle the path of education, even though he had far more opportunity to gain it than most. It seems that as early as high school, his ego did not allow him to deal with the fact that his capacity to absorb education was simply not as great as others around him, so he turned into a bully that found himself first in military school (most likely reinforcing the bullying tendency since military schools have an inordinate number of people with the same problem with education). He then got a second bite at the apple by getting artificially promoted from Fordham to Wharton (thanks Dad for the donations) where he was able to fake his way through (hence his insistence that his academic records be sealed from public view). He then had the patina of education without the underlying substance that helps people sort out those complexities and reason his way along the righteous path.
Some people who are not brain trusts and cannot handle the educational demands are honest with themselves and defer to those with the mental capacity to move the world forward. If they are wise, they do so judiciously, fully understanding that even among educated people there are charlatans that profess wisdom or perhaps distort scientific reality and facts. But for the most part, wise people without the capacity to educate themselves fully (and there is no shame in admitting that limitation) find others in authority to trust and follow their lead. Scientific advancement in the last half millennium is such that the vast majority of us are in that category of being unable to fully comprehend what these people who have dedicated their lives to studying are capable of understanding and doing. We trust their wisdom and knowledge and listen as well as we can to their recommendations for how we address modern complex issues. When it comes to something like space flight, we can just watch from a distance and choose to stay away from it. But when it comes to health issues, it is hard not to be in the thick of it since so many of them are caused by some combination of the complexities of life (side effects of modernity) or the sheer explosion of population, which brings about a proximity of contagion that becomes somewhat unavoidable.
I grew up in an era when Salk and Sabin saved us from polio and we studied other great scientists like Curie and Pasteur and held them in reverence rather than cynicism. I’m sure there were doubters in all ages but it does not seem that we have had anywhere near as many in the public arena as we have since Trump came on the scene. We are now inundated with people like anti-vaxers who have decided that sharing their lack of belief and wisdom with the world is valuable and helpful to society. I am not sure which I think is worse; the people like RFK Jr. who are simply not learned in the ways of science and microbiology and pharmacology spouting half-truths and misleading information, or the promoters of such high idiocy like Joe Rogan, who has made a career and reputation as a broadcaster of doubt and cynicism.
I highly recommend that you spend a few moments watching one of the growing number of debunking videos being published on places like You-Tube by noted and studied scientists who convincingly used rigorous and verifiable evidence to show that the nonsense being trumpeted by Robert Kennedy, Jr. and given voice through media like Joe Rogan is just another case of people who cannot take the right path deciding to promote the wrong path that they have been forced to take. That path devalues education and the rigor of scientific study and research. Kennedy is the roast example of wrong-mindedness gone mad. And the only thing worse than a madman on the lose is the person who puts that madman on a podium to proclaim his insanity to the world at large. Thank you Joe Rogan. I for one will retain my faith in science and educated people, recognizing that they too are capable of honest mistakes, but with the equal understanding that at TL east they have a basis for claiming to know what people like Kennedy and Rogan can never know because they have simply not applied themselves to the rigorous path of getting properly educated. I am proud to be somewhat educated and when I am called a member of the educated liberal elite, I wear it like a badge of honor, not because it makes me a better person, but because it makes me more conversant and capable of understanding the modern complexities of life and not buy into the madness of the uneducated.