They Want You Illiterate For A Reason

I can't make you read, but you should.

Today is my 42nd birthday. If you’re too busy to read this article, press the “Listen” button and play it while you’re doing chores or something. This is important. You can’t ignore it, it’s my birthday.

I’ve been on a few livestreams this year with the gentlemen in this video and both times we had wonderful discussions about literature, culture, history, and the humanities at large. The conversations are a joy to have, and I find myself starved for them because—no disrespect to my brethren of the road—I just don’t get it at work. Even among the other drivers who are well-read and prone to reflection, the nature of our careers doesn’t give us a lot of time to stop and chat. Wheels must turn for us to earn.

That’s one of several reasons why I stay active here and on YouTube. It gives me an outlet. It lets me digest what I’m taking in. Call it cathartic. Even so, production of videos and articles is not the end goal unto itself. What is the objective? To get people to read. To spark their interest and give them a reason to commit the time to this activity, because it is among the oldest forms of education and entertainment, second only to the oral tradition.

One of the most overused words of the last few years is “slop.” I hate it. It’s thoughtless at this point, nevertheless, it’s inarguable that we live under a deluge of “content” and flashy distractions. You are reading this on your phone or your computer, a thousand-dollar device connected to a trillion-dollar infrastructure project backed by countless ideological entities whose sole purpose is to extract as much monetary value from you as possible. (That reminds me, go buy my books, especially HEARTLANDERS.)

Facebook, Google, FoxNews, CNN, Disney, Warner, whoever. They know there will be holdouts and resistance but it’s just a numbers game. Everything exists to sell advertisements, which exist to sell products. They’ll get their value out of the masses and they’ll shrink the number of holdouts. Ideology erodes under constant pressure unless it is constantly refreshed, which is one of the key exercises of religious practices, and everybody has these, even the atheists. If you don’t establish and fortify your core values, someone else will do it for you, and to their own benefit.

An Example From CorpCorp

Let’s take a quick hard right turn here and talk about Andor, a Star Wars show on Disney+. Most of the post-Lucas SW content has been bad-to-forgettable, but Andor sits on an island by itself, unique in its focus and execution. It’s a story about just how hard it was to get the Rebellion started in the wake of the Jedi’s collapse and the rise of the Empire. It’s Star Wars without the Force, without lightsabers, but not without hope.

Cassian Andor is the main character, a pseudo-Kit Carson, if the Rebellion is America’s westward expansion. He just keeps popping up at important turns and he finds himself in the thick of everything. During one leg of the first season, he teams up with other proto-Rebels on a distant Imperial outpost to do a heist in the middle of a stellar holiday.

The Empire has been working hard to subjugate these far planets and bring them under control. This planet in particular (I’m not looking up the name) has a local indigenous group that still holds to its Old Ways and celebrates the stellar holiday with religious pilgrimages. The pilgrimage causes logistical problems for the Empire, so they’ve concentrated their efforts on deterring people from its observation—primarily by setting up their equivalent of liquor stores along the path of the pilgrimage so that the locals will get drunk, get their dopamine fix, and turn around.

The holiday is now a shadow of what it once was. Fewer than ten percent of the people still observe it. These are the holdouts. The Empire gets what it wants and few enough people are a thorn in their side that they tolerate it.

I wonder how many Andor viewers took a lesson from that little piece of backstory. Most of the memes I’ve seen about the show are from surface-level communist anons who look at EVERYTHING in terms of Trump Hitler Palapatine versus Antifa Noble Rebellion, without seeing something more damning in all of this.

Trump is just one guy. Just a name. He’ll be out of office in a few years and in a cemetery before I’m a grandfather. Then we’ll find out just how the next Right Wing politician is Even Worstester than HitlerBushTrump because that’s how this always plays out. The more lasting, more profound takeaway from this part of Andor is:

—Who’s selling you distractions?

—Why?

—And what are they distracting you from?

For my money, the answer is this: the purpose of the so-called Culture War is to make you feel smarter than you are, trap you in a feedback loop (or echo chamber), and reinforce what you want to believe so that you won’t look at anything beyond what you’re told by Your Side.

And looking around at the state of things, Both Sides are succeeding very well at this. And they’re both selling you out. The only thing they agree on is spending more and more and more money, and even more money, and then even more money after that.

The Real Hamilton

Every since I finished The Federalist Papers this year, I’ve really eased up on my criticisms of Hamilton, who historically has filled me with the urge to slam my head repeatedly in the door of a commercial freezer.

I’m no expert on the man but I have read Chernow’s biography of him, I’ve listened to the tracks from the musical (which reflect most of the contents of said biography, with artistic license), and I’ve read all of the FPs. That puts me ahead of 99% of Americans, including those who gush over the musical, which is overrated and racist.

If I could emphasize one major thing about Hamilton and his work, it would be this: the man was a voracious reader, and what he read was monumentally more substantial than what’s being published today, and his comprehension of it was leaps and bounds ahead of yours or mine, and he brought the full force of that erudition to the defense of our nation’s Founding 250 years ago.

The early leg of the Federalist Papers concentrated on historical examples of failed empires that were born from the union of lesser states, such as the Achaean League of Greece, the founding fragments of the ancient Rome, and later the Holy Roman Empire in Europe. The man absolutely understood what makes powerful nations crack and crumble, and then he went on to outline the division of powers in the Constitution that would safeguard America’s future from such a fate, provided we paid heed to it. (We have not.)

Hamilton, like his peers Madison and Jefferson, and the Adamses, and others, was extremely well-read. Sometime between his day and ours, literacy—which we misinterpret as the plain ability to read printed letters off a page—both proliferated and diluted among the masses. More people can read, but I would dare say fewer people actually try to, and fewer people challenge themselves to read anything of real substance beyond genre fluff.

Even literary fiction, which offers up better prose and themes and can provoke more robust intellectual engagement, can’t completely get us up to the level of the Founders, who laid the groundwork for the most powerful nation on Earth after wresting it from the reaches of the most powerful Empire in the world.

What are most women reading? Porn. Fairy smut. “Romantasy.” It’s porn. They brag about it and laugh about it. It’s porn.

What are most men reading? They’re not. We used to. But we got distracted.

Hamilton and the other Founders built our civilization with free weights, red meat, and sleep. We pretend we’re maintaining it with Shake-weights, Zyn pounches, and OnlyFans. It’s no wonder we are where we are.

So what now?

I’ve trod this ground before and I won’t go into an exhaustive measure of detail with it again, suffice it to say here that we need to analyze where our time and energy is going. What are we doing? What could we be doing instead? Yes, some of you are working insane hours at multiple jobs because the boomers screwed us over and the economy sucks, etc and so on and so forth. I’m not arguing against that.

What are we doing to increase our literacy? Not the mere ability to read, but the power to comprehend, to apply, and to resist distraction?

That’s an individual question and the answer will be personal. I don’t know your situation. You don’t know mine. I do know, however, that we can all probably do more to increase our capabilities in this area. To understand where we are being distracted, and who is doing it, and the qui bono of it all. I love genre fiction, I love comics, I love movies, I love all that stuff.

But as I’ve seriously engaged with harder works, with nonfiction, and with the classics over the last several years, I’ve gained a greater understanding of just what I have left on the table along the way. What we’ve all left on the table. And what we’ve failed to preserve along our journey into the future.

“Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together.

Often the very young, the untraveled, the naïve, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them.

No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.”

―Robert Heinlein

In this quote, Heinlein is talking about traditions and social practices. I assert that literacy and the humanities at large are a critical appendage of good conduct. Chesterton likewise writes about this with his fence metaphor: if you don’t know why a fence is in place, don’t tear it down.

And you cannot understand the purpose of our cultural fences, roads, foundations, bridges, homes, and monuments if you don’t $#^$&ing READ ABOUT THEM. Refusing to read the foundational works of our cultural is functionally the same as deliberately sabotaging them. You can try to keep a civilization going off inertia for a while, but inertia runs out. If you don’t keep putting your feet on the pavement to push it along, it will die.

Is our world great? Parts of it. Does it suck? Parts of it. You will not properly understand what those parts are or how they got that way if you do not read. Chances are you’ll just end up destroying something you did not build and cannot repair. So do the right thing. Understand it. Cherish it. Improve upon it.

Read.

Drive safe. See you out there.