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It has been my observation that the habit of accepting ideas on faith begins about the time that children learn their multiplication tables, around age 10. At that point, some people start to memorize words, rather than to exert the mental effort to comprehend concepts. The habit becomes to learn what phrases to parrot, rather than to integrate new knowledge. Dates are memorized, names are memorized, but how many people truly come to understand such notions as the electoral college, compound interest, recessive genes, or a sound currency? We get demands for a popular vote from demagogues on behalf of a populace that often doesn't know that the President isn't elected according to a popular vote. How many people actually understand the origin of paper money? How else could this nation have left a hard currency standard, and at the same time praise FDR as having "saved" our economy.
Even Reagan's popularity wasn't truly based on support for his policies so much as his appearance of strength. People took him on faith. Had he been in any way as malevolent as some on the Left and in the media portrayed him, the evil he could have done would have been incalculable. And the evil done by his successor was made possible only because people associated GHWB with his predecessor. Any true understanding of the elder Bush would have made his unsuitability for office obvious. Unfortunately his predecessor (who himself did not campaign for him) was Reagan, and his opponent was Michael Dukakis. We are paying today in Iraq for the price of the faith that people put in Reagan and in his anointed successor.
Ted Keer
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...that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
