🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

“What is happening here is that television is transforming all serious public business into junk. Television has the effect of diminishing the audience's capacity to reason. What we might call the news of the day reveals only the extent of our ignorance.”

~ Neil Postman

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Watch As Video

Greetings, dear newsletter subscribers!

Apologies for being a day late with the newsletter...if you watch today's video, I think you will understand why(!)

I received the following kind comment on one of my videos this week: "Great content on this channel. Why this channel does not have more subscribers is a mystery to me. (by the way, I like the addition of Gadfly Academy to the channel name.)"

I had already been contemplating this question, so it was nice to learn that I wasn't alone in this(!) So, this past week I have spent time soul-searching, as well as trying to make head-or-tails of how to properly make videos on YouTube.

I am going to continue the book study project, but I may be making the videos for each chapter a bit shorter moving forward (but don't worry, I will be sending you my full breakdown of each chapter each week in the newsletter, and you will also be able to find it on my Substack blog which is where most discussion of each chapter will take place).

As I've mentioned in the past, this is all a bit of an experiment, so until we find the right format for everything, there may be some course corrections. Hopefully you will find this process interesting (I will do my best to keep you in the loop as we move forward!)

One course correction this week is that today I am only going to look at the Foreword to Postman's book. After finishing the video for both the Foreword as well as Chapter One, I realized that it was probably too much material to digest for one week (yes, the Foreword is short, but there is still a lot to discuss!) This will also give other folk the opportunity to catch up a bit.

Why Gadfly Academy?

I haven’t discussed why I’ve started calling this undertaking Gadfly Academy, but now that we’re embarking on our first book study, it seems like a natural place to do so. There are many reasons I decided to use this new name, but for now I’ll just mention where the name comes from. The great philosopher Socrates referred to himself as a gadfly. By which he meant that he was a persistent, and sometimes irritating, voice of reason; through his arguments, he urged his fellow citizens to examine their core assumptions and beliefs. Similarly, our own Gadfly Academy provides a place to question many of our culture’s core beliefs; and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is a key modern text in this ancient tradition.

The Inspiration for Amusing Ourselves to Death

Finally, a quick note on the inspiration for Postman’s book. Postman conceived of the idea while in Germany, where he was presenting at a conference celebrating the arrival of the year 1984, and reflecting on the cultural relevance of George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984. Postman opens his book by comparing the two most influential English dystopian novels of the 20th century: Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Postman’s thesis, as he writes at the end of the Foreword to his book, was that “This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.” (p. xx)

OK...that's it for housekeeping...so, without further ado...

Blind Spots of American Cultural Vigilance

In 1984, Americans celebrated what they regarded as a triumph of liberal democracy. George Orwell's dystopian vision hadn't materialized – no telescreens monitored their every move, no Thought Police patrolled their minds, no Big Brother demanded their unwavering devotion. The intellectual class in particular took pride in this apparent victory over authoritarian control. But in this moment of self-congratulation lay a profound irony that Postman masterfully captures in his Foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Postman's opening passage subtly exposes American cultural blindness (I’ll discuss what lies at the heart of this cultural blindness later). When he writes that "thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves," the sarcasm is palpable. These weren't the uninformed masses but the intellectual elite – the very people tasked with cultural criticism and societal vigilance. They were guilty of what military strategists refer to as "fighting the last war" – preparing for threats based on past experiences while remaining oblivious to new (and in this case, already present) dangers.

This misplaced vigilance was compounded by a distinctly American strain of exceptionalism. The phrase "wherever else the terror had happened" suggests a deeply ingrained belief that authoritarian nightmares were something that happened to "other" countries, never to America itself. This comfortable assumption allowed Americans to maintain their sense of moral and political superiority while missing the transformation happening under their feet.

The true power of Postman's critique lies in its recognition that cultural decay rarely announces itself with jackboots and propaganda posters. While Americans were scanning the horizon for Orwellian threats and navigating the “Red Scare,” they missed the subtle erosion of public discourse through entertainment media, the replacement of reasoned debate with spectacle, and the gradual surrender of critical thinking to the allure of endless amusement.

What makes this passage particularly resonant is its enduring relevance. Today, we still find ourselves vigilant against obvious threats while potentially blind to more subtle dangers. We worry about explicit censorship while algorithms quietly shape our information diet. We fear government surveillance while voluntarily surrendering our privacy to social media platforms. We guard against political propaganda while entertainment and advertising reshape our very modes of thinking.

Postman's opening serves as more than just a critique of 1984's America – it's a warning about the nature of cultural blind spots themselves. The greatest threats to a society's well-being may not be the ones it's actively watching for, but rather the ones that slip in through the back door of progress, comfort, and entertainment. The passage reminds us that cultural vigilance requires not just watching for obvious dangers, but maintaining a critical awareness of how our society's fundamental modes of thinking and communication are being transformed. It should also remind us that in order to measure something, one needs to have a device for measuring. One of the reasons that we find ourselves in the predicament that we find ourselves in is that our society does not have criteria by which to judge the “goodness” of, for example, a mode of entertainment (say, television, to take Postman’s example). I have referred to the Amish before (and I will again, I’m sure!) because the Amish do have criteria by which they judge (and accept or reject) all technologies that they encounter. A large part of our cultural blindness is that we do not have such criteria.

In an age of digital media, viral content, and artificial intelligence, this warning becomes even more pertinent. While we celebrate our technological progress and apparent freedom from traditional forms of control, we must ask ourselves: What are today's blind spots? What transformations are we missing while we congratulate ourselves on avoiding the obvious threats of the past? This is the timeless relevance of Postman's opening – not just as a critique of a particular historical moment, but as a template for understanding how societies can miss the very things that are fundamentally reshaping them.

One of my great aspirations with You Are Not A Machine is that by going deeper into the works of the great cultural critics of the past hundred years, we will increasingly develop this critical awareness, as well as criteria by which we can judge new technologies.

For our next installment, if you haven't already, please read Chapter One of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Again, please join the conversation on Substack + on other platforms.

Have a great week/end...enjoy Neil Postman's excellent book...and reach out to me on socials if you have any thoughts/questions you'd like to share!

Warmly,

Herman

PS: Do you know of someone who might be interested in joining our book study? If so, please forward this email on to them!