Bob Johnson on The Hartmann Report

[Bob Johnson]

The uncivilized, unevolved, irrational thinkers, hate being made to be civilized. Almost all of them are right wingers. There are lunatics and thugs all over the Earth. Until humans do a better job of raising the children, it will only get worse. The family unit,, unlimited greed and religious indoctrination of children, has to end. I don't see that happening, so the future holds a lot of uneeded stress, suffering, abuse and anxiety ahead for the human race. Not good! Do we really know Republicans? How can we know them when they don't even know themselves? They certainly don't know us and can't know us.! Rational thinkers and emotional believers, don't mix. They act like rational thinkers are just here to clean up their messes and serve them and worship them... There's my tangent.

[Robert B. Elliott]

On good days I am less pessimistic than you appear to be. But I have fewer and fewer of those good days now. I agree that the most crucial factor is childrearing and presumably, you were referring to education as part of that. You probably know that I do not believe that our schools as they have been constituted for generations do not and cannot educate or otherwise prepare students for the kind of civilization which most of the people who watch Thom have hoped to see eventually. However, I cannot abandon the hope that things will change. That change cannot happen until the most prominent features of our hostile and antisocial character is mitigated via a radically different educational and social paradigm. Those features come from hyperrationality, as much as from emotionality, and from our pathological dependence on arbitrary authority in families, social institutions, and government. Arbitrary authority is erroneously believed by most of the world’s population to be essential to the development of self-discipline among children and citizens and is inescapable in schools under laws which compel attendance. People are steeped in a view of human nature which originates from the theory of original sin and from the “strict father metaphor”. Those core and mostly unconscious beliefs and impressions are nearly ubiquitous and lead to much of the misery, sanctimony, and hate in society. They are the precursors to authoritarianism and fascism.