This is the real headline of
#fyrefestival: the canary in the critical thinking coal mine is dead.
A washed-up rapper and college dropout turned business-mogul-wanna-be tried to plan a multi million dollar posh island music festival from scratch in a matter of months. Masses of people paid thousands of dollars each, banking that the two could pull it off. The suckers arrived and, instead of finding luxury and the weekend of a lifetime, they found themselves the main characters in a 2017 lord of the flies remake. These people, resolute in their belief that they had purchased gold, were shocked to discover that, in spite of the persistent and well-orchestrated social media veneer, two idiots with no experience or qualification of any sort couldn't pull off a massive event that required terraforming a deserted island into a luxury paradise in a matter of months.
This is funny, sure, but it's also quite serious. This is a microcosm of the current state of politics, really the current state of mankind on the whole. People are wowed by vapid media presences and are completely unwilling or unable to peer beneath the thin surface. They are reeled in hook, line, and sinker and then discover that the people who sold them on the illusion were in over their heads and couldn't possibly deliver on their promises. We can't even call these scams: the people behind them seem to actually think they can deliver. People are so taken in by hearing and seeing PRECISELY what they want to hear and see, they are incapable of stopping to ask the rational questions like "is it reasonable to expect this person to be able to do what he is claiming he will do?" Rational people with clear heads would say "no, this college dropout and rapper duo cannot create this massive event from scratch in months." Just like Rational people with clear heads would say "no this social media hero tv star cannot run the free world." But we don't have enough of those rational people around, and their numbers are shrinking.
It is tempting to downplay this as an inconsequential, thrice-removed cousin in law of the recent elections, but that would be naive . The consequences of a vote are for many people so distant and opaque that it should not surprise us that they are insufficient to incentivize rational behavior by all. It isn't quite the same for fyre fest: people spent thousands of dollars to travel to a deserted island and have barely any food to eat, FEMA tents as shelter, little water and electricity, and be victimized by violence and theft- all of which were predictable, tangible, and quickly felt consequences. The desire to avoid self harm may not be sufficiently triggered in the voting booth, but surely it should have been for those deciding whether or not to believe in the promise of the fyre fest.
If it wasn't clear before fyre fest, it ought to be clear now: we are in the midst of a culture-defining critical thinking crisis and it has reached epidemic levels. Educators have a moral imperative to fix this. We must train students to respond to what they see around them with reasoned suspicion instead of unshackled emotion. Society must be moved from rash to rational. We need a re-Enlightenment.
