Engineering Ignorance

Those who seek power no longer require tanks in the streets. In modern-day America, they need only control your education, the flow of information, and your level of financial desperation.

The idea that people are capable of governing themselves is the foundation of the Constitution. Yet almost from the beginning, those in power have doubted it. Their distrust of the public, combined with a thirst for power, fueled a coordinated effort to hide the truth. Why? Because they knew that knowledge is power, and to maintain their grip, the powerful learned to engineer ignorance.

Schools became an obvious early target. To cultivate loyalty and obedience, the true history of America was sanitized or omitted altogether. The slaughter of Native Americans was recast as a righteous conquest over "savages," even as the U.S. government broke treaty after treaty, committing horrific acts of genocide. The brutality, which continues to this day, was hidden, allowing a myth of virtue to thrive. Even into the 1970s, U.S. government policy sanctioned the forced sterilization of Native American women, a continuation of efforts to suppress and erase Indigenous populations under a thin veil of righteousness. High school textbooks don’t mention this shameful corner of American history.

The Tulsa Massacre revealed a different truth: A truth of deep racial resentment against Black prosperity. It was buried in silence for a hundred years, absent from textbooks and public discourse.

Even the suffering of America's own veterans was erased. After World War I, veterans demanding their promised bonuses were met with tanks and bullets under the command of George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower. Few Americans today know that veterans who fought bravely in a war against overbearing governments bled out on the streets of Washington, D.C., at the hands of their own government.

Wars of aggression were no exception. The Mexican-American War, sold with the rallying cry of "Remember the Alamo," hid the uncomfortable truth that Mexico had abolished slavery, and Texas's secession—and eventual U.S. conquest—was in part a fight to preserve it. Later, false pretenses would fuel the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, with media outlets complicit in repeating government narratives without question.

Yes, our own media betrayed us for decades. The collapse of truthful media accelerated engineered ignorance. When the Fairness Doctrine fell in the 1980s, so did the last barrier to the domination of popular narrative by power-hungry autocrats within our government. After the fall of the Fairness Doctrine, the media landscape legally consolidated into a handful of giant corporations more concerned with shareholder profits than public enlightenment. News became a commodity; sensationalism became the product. Truth and critical inquiry were abandoned to further the cause of engineered ignorance. Without diverse, competing narratives, the public became easier to steer. Rage, fear, and division were stoked not by accident, but by design. A distracted, emotional public is easier to control than a critically engaged and educated one.

Meanwhile, the struggle for financial survival steadily eroded the public's ability to stay informed and think critically. Since the 1960s, wages stagnated while the cost of housing doubled, and higher education slipped further out of reach. After unions built and delivered a strong middle class during the 1950s and 1960s, those in power began turning the screws. Over the following decades, unions were systematically weakened, forcing families to rely on two incomes to make ends meet. Exhausted by the demands of daily life, individuals had little time or energy left to seek out reliable news or engage in critical analysis. News consumption became a passive, background activity, easily manipulated and rarely questioned.

What news was consumed served only to harden the American soul. Teachings rooted in compassion—like those found in Matthew 25—were replaced by a hardened philosophy that questioned every aspect of social empathy. The poor were blamed for their poverty, the homeless for their plight, and the sick for their suffering. Instead of building a compassionate society, many Americans learned to blame the outsider for every societal ill. Evangelical mega-churches turned away from the original teachings of Christianity and embraced a philosophy more aligned with Ayn Rand than with Jesus Christ. Divisiveness, fortified by a manufactured sense of godly righteousness, permeated the nation, driving a wedge through its heart. Those in power benefited enormously because when people fought among themselves, they didn't see that their pockets were being picked by the wealthy and powerful.

In this exhausted and morally depleted landscape, critical thinking gave way to simplistic talking points centered on hatred and exclusivity. Concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion were distorted into accusations of racism, inequity, and exclusion. Instead of questioning the narratives that drove society to this point, many people internalized them, fortifying the engineered ignorance.

These days, the word "woke," which initially meant "enlightened," has been twisted into something negative. The engineered ignorance has been so thorough that many people don't realize they're defending a system designed to keep them uneducated, unenlightened, and uniformed. Instead, they embrace ignorance with emotional zeal and will fight in the streets to defend it, using "woke" as a battle cry, much like "Remember the Alamo."

Today, Artificial Intelligence offers both opportunities and threats. Properly used, AI could liberate millions from mindless labor, freeing time for education, creativity, and civic engagement. Lawyers, programmers, and researchers already multiply their productivity with AI tools, suggesting a future where time, not labor, defines human dignity. In the near future, advances in technology could lighten the workload on the average American family, giving parents more time to raise their children, expanding access to education, and revitalizing efforts to eliminate hunger, homelessness, and preventable diseases.

But this utopian future is far from guaranteed. If AI remains in the hands of monopolistic corporations and manipulative governments, it will become the ultimate instrument of engineered ignorance, automating propaganda, suppressing dissent, and shaping reality itself. The threat is real because those in power are aware of the stakes. A public armed with critical thinking and abundant time would be their worst nightmare. A government genuinely controlled by the people would shatter the grip of political elites and the ultra-wealthy. The real threat from AI isn't a Terminator-like future; it's the powerful few who aim to harness AI as a tool to manipulate and dominate public thought.

Power doesn't require tanks rolling down the streets. It only requires the careful construction of the invisible forces of ignorance, distraction, and exhaustion. Those who've engineering ignorance have had many decades to perfect their art; it will take strong, intentional effort to break out of it. Our future, and the future of generations to come, will belong either to the critically aware or the comfortably numb.

The choice, as always, is ours.