POL113H5 Study Guide - Final Guide: Meritocracy, Impulsivity, Russell Kirk
Document Summary
Postman: we"re drowning in technology; no way to make sense of it, no way to filter it into something useful. Wilson: people would rather shock themselves electrically than reflect on themselves for 15 minutes. Plato: people are prisoners of their own ignorance and will attack anyone who shares what reality is actually like. we gain knowledge by coming out of our ignorance and exploring the world around us. Hobbes: we need total absolute authority over society to maintain peace. we need strict effective laws enforced on us. if there was no authority, everything would be chaos. Prose: reality tv corrupts us as it casts ordinary individuals to brutally compete and deceive each other for rewards like cash and/or bachelors/bachelorettes. Orwell: newspeak is designed to limit thought and creativity by dumbing down the language into such a simplistic form. In so doing, newspeak not only eliminates unnecessary words, but it also promotes a narrowing of thought and, therefore, awareness.
