The Assault on Reason

"Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving senator, Rober Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This Chamber is, for the most part, silent - ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."

This is the opening of Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason." He goes on to explain that the US made the mistake of invading Iraq not entirely because of George W. Bush, but because the American public sphere has changed. TV no longer broadcasts congressional debates about important policy decisions like it used to in order to inform, debate, and make the right decisions. Instead, to win the votes of the American public a politician needs to be rich (ie donations from special interest groups), and buy precisely crafted TV ads:

"I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent...was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a long and detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent's campaign and the planned response to the response, my campaign advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: "If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we perchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5 percent in your lead in the polls." I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5 percent."

Democracy is failing because, according to Al Gore and I would agree with him, because of the dominance of television in the way our society thinks. It's a one-way medium, there is no involvement by the audience in the "exchange" of information, which means that whoever is in control is free to put their ideas in the sphere, and this is mostly determined by who's got the most money. In fact, watching TV stimulates a certain section of the brain, whereas reading stimulates a different section that is more involved with reasoning and logic. People who watch several hours of TV in a day have fundamentally different brain processes than those who read several hours a day because they're exercising different parts of the brain. When reading, words are merely symbols with no inherent meaning...as readers we take part in the creation process when we string together the symbols and make meaning out of them. Our TV generation of people have brains hardwired with different thought processes. And it's for this reason that the majority of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and the reason why democracy does not exist in America.