Article #1 >>>>> Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Volume VIII, Number 7, January 2022

 

Article #1

The Degradation of Life in Year 2022

 

The typical person in the United States lives a degraded existence.

That person has no understanding of why she or he does what the individual does, having no grasp of the bio-environmental determinants of human behavior.  

Human behavior proceeds on the basis of biological imperatives studied and presented with clarity by Edmund O. Wilson and environmental determinants seminally examined and explained by B. F. Skinner.  

With a proper understanding that behavior is determined rather than willed freely, inhabitants of the globe could gain comprehension of those forces that impel and compel people to do what they do.  There is no reality in the perception of free will, but people do have the native intelligence to study the bio-environmental determinants of behavior so as to establish those institutions and to design those environments conducive to favorable outcomes for humanity.

But in the absence of knowledge of psychological reality, people are susceptible to false claims, superstition, and surreptitious messages.  People cling to facile notions of free will while in fact being controlled from the moment of birth by their circumstances of genetic inheritance, family, community, and parameters of life that compel their actions.  Perceiving that they make choices, people are driven from one life stage to another by multiple forces pertinent to highly particular personal experience and those of pervasive, multiple media that coalesce with individual circumstance.

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In the absence of knowledge of self;  knowing little of history, government, geography, economics, and world culture;  lacking appreciation for exquisite music and visual art;  uncomfortable in and alienated from nature;  insensitive to beauty of nature and human creation;  the typical person lives out this one earthly sojourn as an automaton given to base addictions.

Not until we are positioned to become people of knowledge and ethics will people gain the opportunity to live lives of meaning.

In the meantime, daily life and an abundance of contemporary dilemmas are replete with catastrophic reminders of the human degradation that now abides.