To paraphrase Bob Marley – “No read, no civilization”. It pretty much covers the abysmal, inexcusable, state of the world. Aliteracy means basically “anti-literacy” or “uninterested in reading”. We now have academics proudly saying they don’t read and justifying it with inspired, diamond-like statements like “life’s too short”. We have alleged people criticizing books they’ve never read.
This is the state of the world. The astonishingly ignorant are allowed to be ignorant and they’re proud of it.
For a truly hideous perspective on this highly overpaid galloping ignorance, read The Walrus.com’s very irritating but pithy, stinging article on aliteracy from 2019. It’s extremely annoying, but it makes every point that people who do read have always suspected/expected. The alliterate critics are just more privileged, pig-ignorant college animals, released into global media as “experts”.
The much less impressive side to this is that aliteracy is also a norm among “educated” people. Why so? Is one so “educated” that one doesn’t need to be more educated, no way, nohow? This smug level of ignorance hardly needs explanation. Burying, possibly, but not explaining.
Let’s explore this smelly little aliterate lifestyle a bit.
TLDR – “Too long, didn’t read”, or “Too dumb, didn’t read”?
What’s obvious is that not reading is now some sort of cretinous Trump-like (Trump is famously not a reader of anything, a character reference) crusade. TLDR is an acronym you find on many documents in business. Any amount of work can be conscientiously NOT read by anyone, it seems.
This is actual, accepted business practice. It only makes sense if you grow up dodging reading since early childhood. (A childhood that could have been much illuminated by reading, of course.) The mental stamina is so minimal it can’t even follow a story line, let alone the vagaries of real information.
(The irony is that those who don’t read are also often pedants and ideology-crazed fanatics. They’ll argue about the meaning of a word and overprioritize it to death when they can’t even keep track of its context. They can babble on happily about anything but suddenly get lost their own sentences. Hence the public relations industry to make them seem plausible as human beings.)
Let me give you an example. Obviously you haven’t suffered enough. This is from a despairing job interview:
Interviewer: You have a B.Lit, I see? What have you read?
Interviewee: Oh… things…. I read Mark Iavelli, I think his name was… management handbook.
Interviewer: Let’s try a little visualization. Foxie Loxie and Chicken Little “went along and went along”. What do you think that means?
Interviewee: I think it means they were really good friends?
Interviewer: Please don’t beat yourself to death with the doorknob on the way out.
Why read? A few teensy-weensy pointers for teensy-weensy aliterate brains
Check out wherever you are right now. Every single damn thing you’re surrounded with all your life is the result of literacy. Your furniture, your car, your clothes, your attempted pseudo-social life. You can’t build a building or a life without it. Your substitute for life, your phone, wouldn’t exist without it. Point made?
The fact the point needs to be made at all shows the sheer mental laziness of this trashy, pointless, mindless, objective-less “civilization”. The fear of expertise, which also requires reading, is another symptom of sheer lack of mental capacity. Experts know what they’re talking about. Aliterate idiots don’t. It’s socially awkward, you know.
Let’s clarify the “why read” bit:
- Reading is mental processing. It’s supposed to start in day care so kids can understand more complex communications than “vroom”, “Donald”, and “dolly”.
- Reading creates mental visualization. If you can’t visualize, you’re severely handicapped. Information doesn’t get understood properly in terms of possible risks and rewards.
- Reading is a survival skill. If you can’t/won’t read a contract, or can’t/won’t handle basic information, you’re existentially screwed. …And so you should be.
- Reading allows extrapolation and development of ideas. Not reading means you can’t do either. You do a lot less thinking, which is downright unhealthy and dangerous in any environment.
…So aliteracy is effectively suicidal on a personal level. On a societal level, it’s highly destructive. Think how many huge basic issues affecting the entire world have been around for years, unsolved, or not acted upon. That’s despite billions of words being written about them. It’s despite billions of words proposing solutions to the problems, too.
Any theories on why that might be? Because a few chickenbrains are too dumb to even bother to try to understand any of it, perhaps? TLDR? Says so much.
Aliteracy as a world problem
Just look at everything that’s not being done worldwide, or done appallingly badly. Look in particular at the problems that could be easily solved and aren’t, for the flimsiest of ridiculous excuses. That’s what aliteracy is all about. Morons at work.
Put it this way – You want total failure, get mentally incapable people to manage anything, let alone serious problems. You want mass extinction, keep doing that. Aliteracy is a disease, far worse than COVID, and far more dangerous. You’ve been warned.
