Pelaut,
It’s a sad thing to see the world decay. I feel like Eddie Willers at the end of Atlas Shrugged, I can’t let it go, but at the same time I also know that minds ruined by disinformation and public education can’t be expected to think rationally.
Your description, “rigid gestalts formed from unknowable visual fragments”, and Oleg’s analogy about “a prefabricated optical lens that redirects incoming information and rearranges the existing dots”, both tie in with something Ayn Rand said about education…
“If you want to grasp what the comprachicos’ methods have done to the mind of a high-school student, remember that the intellect is often compared to the faculty of sight. Try to project what you would feel if your eyesight were damaged in such a way that you were left with nothing but peripheral vision. You would sense vague, unidentifiable shapes floating around you, which would vanish when you tried to focus on them, then would reappear on the periphery and swim and switch and multiply. This is the mental state — and the terror — produced in their students by the comprachicos of Progressive education.” — from The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
And yet some heroic individuals do make it through the system with functional minds, and they can make more of a difference than ever. Like Daniel Hannan for example, he rocked the world with this one brilliant speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs
So while I’m going Galt, I’m not counting out Han Solo.
