"In the age of information, ignorance is a choice." Donald Miller
In the world of the most politically correct, no one is ignorant — even flat wrong, They're just "differently informed." Folks who believed that Barrack Obama was an African-born Muslim, for example, weren't gullible knuckle-heads. They were, at least according to these relativists, "differently informed,"
When Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested a Rothschild-financed Jewish space laser might be igniting those devastating wildfires in California, she was not revealing stunning stupidity, nor cunningly engaged in hate-mongering demagoguery. She was merely "differently informed." In this case she was aided by "alternative facts."
How deliciously nonjudgmental. No assertion is too ridiculous nor obviously laughable to be dismissed. Preposterous assertions are merely "differently informed." Informed "by what?" By whatever half-baked nonsense nincompoops happen to subscribe to. In this fun house, no one is simply wrong. No, no, instead it's like being left instead of right handed. There's no right or wrong, no fault involved, no personal responsibility. Just different, equally acceptable, conceptions of reality.
Really "woke" folks actually reject the possibility that some sources of authority are more accurate than others. That is too judgmental. They even implicitly deny that ignorance exists. Take, for example, those folks who adamantly insist that the condensation trails left by planes flying at high altitude are actually "chemtrails" laced with harmful substances, released for one or another sinister purpose by the villain of their choice.
In a normal world this abysmally ignorant claim would simply discredit the believer. But not in the woke world. Here, any and all conceptions, even those in clear violation of a known natural causes, are plausible. Why? Because factual claims no longer require adequate supporting evidence. Should some dimwit believe it, that's good enough.
In the real world individuals embracing puerile buncombe are dismissed out of hand. Not in this world. In this fact-free zone there are no ignoramuses, no blockheads, no dimwits, no cretins. Not even a single shit head! For instance, if someone insists the earth is a mere 6,000 years old, not the scientifically affirmed 4.5 billion, they're not way, way off. The're not utterly wrong. They're just "differently informed."
In this Alice in Wonderland world any sources become authoritative should someone subscribe to them. When born-again believers embrace the preposterous notion that our earth is 6,000 years old, as mentioned above, they likely are relying on the calculations of Bishop Ussher — a 17th Century Church of Ireland prelate — who painstakingly added up all the generations of the Bible, cranked in every post-Biblical generation he could find, and gravely concluded that creation took place on 23 October, 4004 BC at 6 P.M. (He was a bit uncertain about the exact time of day.)
Was Usher correct? Of course not. He was as full of crap as a Christmas turkey. But for the fully "woke," the late Bishop's reckoning is at least as good as centuries of painstaking scientific investigation and vast amounts of contrary physical evidence.
But in the wacky world of the really politically correct, any fact claim, however hare-brained, is just as good as any other. And the enormous amount of factual drivel available on social media reinforces this idiocy many times over. Search the internet and you will come up with an enormous amounts of puerile none-sense that, nevertheless, has an abundance of supporters.
How, in the name of reason, did these zealots end up there? Well, there is a long-standing debate about whether knowledge is structured by a unique relationship to "reality," or is "socially constructed." In other words can there be an "objective" organization of facts about the world, or does that organization totally depend upon the interests of the organizers?
The value of this socially constructed point of view is that it helps identify potential stakeholders. In other words, it suggests whose interests are being served. However, it nullifies the power of a truly revolutionary method for factual discovery. Namely, the scientific method. Designed to be independent of special interests, this methodology continuously produces astonishingly powerful results.
Unfortunately, the most "woke" accept the socially constructed view so enthusiastically that they end up thinking that all knowledge — except their own, of course — is entirely relative. And they therefore think it follows that all knowledge claims must be given equal weight.
What are the implications of this toxic "tolerance" for schooling? It lays waste every form of education based on the scientific method. With the search for truth abandoned, with knowledge a matter of opinion, with any viewpoint as good as any other, scholarship is vaporized and insipid, muddle-headed "tolerance" takes over.
Worse, schooling's sorting function, in which relative merit is measured, becomes completely inoperative. No more graduating with honors. No more failures either. Everybody in this world get's an "A." Just don't count on expertise in any area of your life. Need cardiac surgery? Good luck with that. Live in a high-rise? Make sure your life insurance is paid up.
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