Everybody Knows

One of the things about studying hypnosis is that you come to realize that people pick up everything. They don't miss a thing. It's all in there. You hypnotize a few subjects and you can be absolutely astonished at how much people know, how much they have in their heads, from even back into their childhood.
 

I remember being with my father once in his old age when he came out with one of his startling and memorable observations on life. Those were such golden moments. This time he said: “People pick up on everything, more even than animals.”

This is currently on my mind because of my recently having read a book on how “dumb” “Americans” are. There are a lot of these books around now. You are probably familiar with Jay Leno's “Jay Walking” segments where he goes out on the streets and interviews people who can't identify the name of the U.S. President or Vice President. They can't locate New York on an unlabelled map, never mind locate Canada. Stuff like that. People who voted for Bush the second time. People who watch TV an average of more than eight hours per day.

But you find when you get to know such people that they know far more and are way more intelligent than meets the eye of anyone who likes to feel superior to them. I think it's never fair to say that people are stupid, much less the whole United States.

The book I just read, Why America Failed, by Morris Berman, says things like this:

What possibly can be done to save a culture that thinks iPads represent 'progress,' while everything humanly valuable is going down the drain?

(Quoting de Tocqueville): '...the least reproach offends it, and the slightest sting of truth turns it fierce; one must praise everything, from the turn of its phrases to its most robust virtues...Hence the majority lives in a state of self-adoration....'

No. I think the same kind of arrogance is behind the “banality of evil” explanations of Eichmann et al. The traditional view of evil, that it was clever in the extreme, is surely true. People are sharp, clever, knowing – even more than animals.