The CEOs of Silicon Valley are the envy of the world. They know how to channel advances in software and hardware into financial success. Business and communication has become streamlined. People are hungry for dazzling entertainment. It is still uncertain, however, if they can be trusted with historical heritage and traditional values that tie the current generation with all of those that have come before.
It’s a safe bet, however, that few are religious or have a moral training that transcends what can be picked up on television. Their lives parallel the growth of telecasting from big urban centers where unelected and little-known media moguls arrange for programming that has been chosen by public appetite. The industry really came of age during the 1960s, a time when women were liberated from households, street drugs promised one-way tickets to utopias, and sexual freedom became available as the new birthright.
Gone were women who stayed home to manage families and moral guidance. Kids came home to empty houses, and they didn’t go to church on Sundays. At first, kids fended for themselves with Leave It to Beaver and The Waltons providing some moral compass. Things got slacker and slacker over time. Guarantees started to disappear, just as reading itself fell away dramatically. Almost overnight grandkids started showing up for visits without books. Now they had electronic games. Their attention was captured, but they didn’t seem happy or satisfied.
It’s also too bad that the bottom fell out of the humanities curriculum in colleges and schools, replaced with politically correct versions of what a now very-liberal professoriate and faculty thought was better for students than centuries of intellectual tradition.
This is the education that CEOs and other workers in Silicon Valley tended to receive. Most would have had technical educations in engineering and business, with little of value in the humanities. No diversity of thought that comes from the literature of the past. No history that wasn’t propagandized in advance. It had already been dumbed down and culturally lobotomized, providing yet another reason to stick with the here and now of more “practical” studies like marketing.
No wonder that Apple CEO Tim Cook reacted exactly the same as a typical TV addict to criticizing Trump about “separated families” at the border when the President decided to take a stand again unchecked immigration and criminal trespass against America’s sovereignty. Cook was getting the same distorted news focus that the public was receiving from the handful of news stations with fake reporting.
“It’s heartbreaking to see the images and hear the sounds of the kids,” Cook reflexively shared on CNet. “Kids are the most vulnerable people in any society. I think that what’s happening is inhumane, it needs to stop. I’m personally a big believer in the way to be a good citizen is to participate, is to try to advocate your point of view, not to just sit on the sideline and yell or complain. That will be the approach we will take here. This one in particular is just heartbreaking and tragic.” This is what everyone was supposed to say and think, without any lifelong educational input, without any independent or considered moral evaluation or critical thinking.
Great for the left, not so much for the right. Wonderful for media collectivism, not so much for individual freedom. The Silicon Valley nouveau riche elite can join forces with wealthy football players and movie stars to teach our young people about right and wrong. Many look to the Democratic Party and a few duped GOP allies for leadership.
