What lengths of utter stupidity has humanity finally sunk to when we reference a 1980's television show about a talking car to dictate our philosophical ideals?! I wonder if twenty years from now we can reference
American Idol and the competition involving it to explain survival of the fittest? Perhaps instead of Nietzsche we can reference the latest episode of
House to get a better understanding of nihilism? In order to come across some truly profound and deep political thinking, we should do away with the works of people like Locke, Smith, and Hobbes and focus on episodes of
24 and
The West Wing.
Perhaps we can take things a step further and not just examine the philosophical implications of television but we can use it as a complete educational tool. Instead of teaching health and gym class in high school, we can just show episodes of
The Biggest Loser. In science class, we can just show a few episodes of the sitcom
The Big Bang Theory. Oh, and we mustn't forget that history should be taught with HBO shows like
The Tutors or Showtime's
Spartacus.
Reading books could well be eradicated as well. Everyone knows that any book worth reading almost always has a movie to go along with it where any moral or philosophical ideas can be visually extracted rather than read and interpreted via a critical wavelength of thinking.
We can learn all sorts of things from our nightly television programming. We can get a better idea of the Golden Age of the 50's by examining
I Love Lucy and her struggle with Desi as a subjugated wife working towards a better women's suffrage movement. We can perhaps better understand decades like the 70's by watching shows such as
That 70's Show.
We could build forth entire armies of young innovators and inventors by showing re-runs of
Macgyver at places like MIT, Cal Tech, and Harvard.
ER doctors in training can simply learn how to perform critical and lifesaving operations by watching none other than the show
ER.
In a final coup d'etat of all of our intellect and knowledge, we can just plop our fat asses on the couch every night and watch re-runs of MTV's
The Real World to get a better idea of the sociological impact of several people who all have different personalities and what they do when put together in an RV or very nice house. This could far surpass any Stanford, Harvard, or Princeton sociological study.
Kudos to the brilliant minds who garner their intellectual prosperity from such wondrous avenues as 80's television! I'm sure every philosopher worth his weight is stooped over in awe at the philosophical implications of one episode of
Knight Rider shown some 25-30 years ago.
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I've noticed that when Christians see that video, they don't just find it creepy, but seem to be genuinely horrified by it (at least the ones I've shown it to). If you read Mark Twain's actual story The Mysterious Stranger it's not quite the same.
