The Ignorati of Substack and America
"Do You Know What is Happening in this Country?!"
The Ignorati, those who talk publicly and loudly about things they are not experts on, pose a threat to social order and growth if not counteracted by the truth.1
When I was twelve-years old I received, as a gift, a brand new Panasonic cassette tape recorder.
The year was 1974 and the number one headline news topic was Watergate. The United States of America was consumed with the revelation and unveiling of the crimes of then President Richard M. Nixon; his crime in a short phrase was—domestic espionage, by way of attempting to surreptitiously audio-record (via tape recording) the private conversations of the Democratic Party’s leadership. While to be sure his attempt to gain a decisive advantage over his Democratic political-party opponents’ was actually comprised of an extensive web of various actions and decisions, all of which ultimately led to his resignation from office, at its core root his crime was one of conducting an illegal action/operation because he wanted to know what his ideological enemies were talking and thinking about.
This all took place fifty years ago, and at that time I was a sixth-grade student in my small town’s elementary school. Now I definitely remember Watergate for what basically amounts to two reasons. Those reasons are as follows: one, Miss Jordan who was the teacher that taught the Social Studies component of my sixth-grade curriculum talked about Watergate almost exclusively during that entire school year, not that all that much of what she talked about stuck with me, because, well I was only twelve-years old, and seriously what young teen-aged child is actually interested in such things; Two, one day during lunch in the cafeteria I had brought along my new tape recorder to show off to my friends in school. Naturally we as young boys spent many minutes of our lunch time with me recording things that we said and playing them back to listen to, for simple fun, again being young boys that we were. Now before our lunchtime was over a few of the boys got into a, let us call it, heated discussion. I naturally without thinking about it recorded the discussion. Oh, how little did I know what that action would lead to for me.
After lunchtime was over and I had stopped recording the conversation, and like everyone else, I went back upstairs to my primary classroom which happened also to be Miss Jordan’s classroom. I do not recall what the classroom subject was for that next hour after lunchtime, but I do recall that there was a brief indoor recess time that lasted about fifteen minutes before the next subject was taken up. So again quite naturally I gathered together with some friends, some of whom had been present with me during lunchtime earlier and some who had not, and by common consent began to replay the heated conversation that I had recorded during the end of lunchtime. Unrealized by me and my friends Miss Jordan apparently had been paying attention to me and my tape recorder. She came over and asked in a very stern voice what we were listening to and I told her about what I had done. She was furious!
She then proceeded to lecture me and my classmates about the seriousness of Watergate and how I had essentially committed the same crime as President Nixon. After she was done lecturing us she made me delete the conversation from the cassette tape and then she took the recorder away from me and threw it into the small paper waste bucket next to her desk, as a punishment.
The most importantly stated words that I still remember her saying when she started lecturing me was “DO YOU KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS COUNTRY?!” Those words I have never forgotten.
Now here I am fifty years later wondering to myself ‘Does anyone know what is happening in this country?!’ To be perfectly clear I am thinking about the vast numbers of people whom I have encountered here on Substack and by way of any number of comment sections in the myriads of news media I read on a daily basis. So many, innumerable people, seem to be so casually and seemingly unaware of the truly serious nature of what is currently happening within our country’s government policy-making systems, especially at the Federal levels.
Naturally for many who read my newsletter, and any number of other like-minded writers, all of whom are essentially left-of-center ideologically with regards to politics, the most immediate and recent events to have taken place here at Substack have merely served to emphasize what I am focusing on here with this essay tonight; namely the controversy of the presence of Nazi supporters and sympathizers, and the flood of Ignorati with their verbiage aimed directly in an attacking barrage of commentary against those of us who dared to stand up to and against the presence of Authoritarian minded, bigoted, racist, thinkers and in particular the disingenuous libertarian double-speak of the website’s founding/managing leaders.
Now I would like to say that due to the entire controversy I found it necessary, for myself, to do some investigating, reflecting, and serious thinking about Substack and my place within and use of the website overall. I have concluded that this website is a genuine and very large disinformation bubble, and that genuinely true, objective, accurate information comprises a significant minority presence here; but to be perfectly clear nearly every social-mediatized website presents with the same dichotomy, wherein fact-based, objective, thinking is nearly always a minority position.
So then what should those in the minority knowledge position try to learn and understand from this revelation? And what, if anything, can be done to mitigate this situation?
These two questions and others like them will now in all likelihood guide my writings here at Substack from this point onwards. In fact it has been my nascent goal up to this point in time to try and present my readers with valid and more or less little known information that would help them to better understand the various factors and forces at work in our society that seek to undermine the tenants of our democracy’s classic liberal foundations, for the purposes of supplanting our historically developed freedoms and hard won civil rights, with dogmas rooted in deistic epistemologies, that rightfully by this point in time should have been consigned to the trash bins of history alongside with the myriads of failed methods of understanding the realities of Reality.
So with all these things in mind I would like to suggest that in order to understand America’s Ignorati problem it will be necessary to take a good hard look at American Education in general with a more specific focus on the exaggerated elevation of the Higher Education spheres of influence and perceptions thereof.
For the moment and until I return with my next piece of writing to continue this particular conversation, about what the minority knowledge position should try to learn about and understand so as to mitigate the effects of the American Ignorati, I would like to bring to your attention and for your contemplation a rather remarkable statistical fact.
Recent reporting per the National Science Foundation (NSF) via the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics with “new data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED)” has determined with data from 2022 that the total “number of research doctoral conferrals… [Doctorate Degrees; Ph.D.s] …in a single academic year [2022]: [was] 57,596”2
Now with the figure of 57,596 in mind juxtapose that number with the total reported number of Doctoral Degrees reported by the Census Bureau of the USA for reporting from the year 2021 in which we learn that out of the adult population of 18-years and older persons (a total of 253,418,000 persons out of a total calculated population of 331,449,281—Source: 2020 Decennial Census) that the reported total of all Doctoral Degrees was only 4,740,000 persons.3
Given the numbers and data/information presented above a simple rough statistical analysis demonstrates that slightly less than 1.5% of the total American population has a Doctorate degree.
I do not know what anyone else might think when they are confronted with that remarkably small number, but I will say that it seems to me that it is an indication of how woefully under-educated American Society is actually and factually, with regards to the highest level of education. The remaining 31+% of college degree educated persons are spread out across the spectrum of degrees from AA to BA to MA and along with the Ph.Ds make up less than 1/3 of the total American population.
Is it any wonder that the Ignorati seem to have the upper hand in any conversation?
Until we meet again.
Robert J. Rei, January 22, 2024
"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." -Aldous Huxley
“The Rise of The Ignorati” INDVSTRVS, November 29, 2022, https://indvstrvs.org/the-rise-of-the-ignorati/ (This is an excellent one page commentary that is well worth reading, for its discussion about “All those who talk loudly, and very publicly, about things they are not experts on.” Of whom can be observed in the profundity of ineffably sub-par comments proffered up by the uncountable masses of self-aggrandizing social media commenters.)
"Research Doctorate Conferrals Rebound, Leading to Record Number of U.S. Doctorate Recipients in 2022” Ruth Heuer, Peter Einaudi, and Kelly Kang, September 28, 2023, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES): National Science Foundation (NSF), https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23353
"Educational Attainment in the United States: 2021” The United States Census Bureau, February 24, 2022, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2021/demo/educational-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html (Table 1. Educational Attainment of the Population 18 Years and Over, by Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 2021: All Races [<1.0 MB] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/educational-attainment/2021/cps-detailed-tables/table-1-1.xlsx
One problem is there are too many things to know, and too much to understand.
I have a doctoral degree and I spend most of my free time reading. Sometimes I think I care about too many things. I barely keep up with information about them—when I can even find reliable information.
Even friends with with doctoral degrees comment on how much I know about random stuff. They say ‘how do you know this, how do you remember that?’ It may be their time was spent on their specialized work whereas I spend my time absorbed all the newspapers and magazines I feel compelled to read. Often, it is simply information I remember from the past, things from all the years reading the newspaper, magazines, books that are not at all in my areas of specialization—simply things I got obsessed with. Maybe it’s absurd that I feel guilty for all the rabbit holes I have gone down in my life. Sometimes these things help direct my research but more often they don’t.
So it’s not even great for my career as an academic to be a fox rather than a hedgehog. I am probably hardwired for this though.
Since Trump was elected I may have even become somewhat hyper-vigilant, just trying to keep up. I am pretty sure the reason i remember a lot of what I read is that factual information often becomes associated with emotions I have. The other day I was rattling off stuff about the Iraq War that nobody else remembers. It is very likely I remember because I knew we were being lied to, and this upset me deeply. I was obsessed with finding out whatever I could. (This did help my research, luckily, but I would have been like this anyway.)
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