Written by Jimmy Crespo Throughout our history, political ignorance has been one of the most relevant illnesses of society due to the serious consequences it meant for the people, while the oligarchic sectors benefited from it. Before talking about the current political ignorance, I would like to take a look at history, to observe how this disease of society acted in the "beta" democracies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to know what were their causes and consequences as well as how some people tried to combat it is important to compare it with today's reality and see if there has progressed. By the 17th century, the famous British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes warned us that if the population is not educated, politicians could use this lack of knowledge to their advantage. So, in the film Daens (Coninx, 1992) we see a small reflection of the political ignorance that existed in the second half of the 19th century in Belgium, produced mostly by illiteracy, which between 1866 and 1900 was on average 58.75%, data by the UNESCO Institute for Education in Belgium. It should be noted that illiteracy has been one of the great causes of political ignorance in European democracies, according to the thesis of Esther Yolanda and Percy Simon of the University of Piura in Peru, illiteracy leads to the marginalization of people because it does not know what their rights and obligations are, and also limits their cognitive development. This results in two incapacities for the voter, the first is that he does not know if he can vote and the second is that he does not discern in a logical and reasoned way the arguments presented to him by the different political groups. Another fact to comment is that said illiteracy was mainly caused by the inaction of governments at that time due to political-economic factors, because firstly, maintaining an illiterate society managed to freeze the development of ideologies opposed to oligarchic interests and secondly, between the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century Europe was at the height of the Industrial Revolution, since in this process of industrialization it was not convenient to educate children in order to be exploited in factories. Despite attempts to maintain this reality, illiteracy was combated by the development of the labour movement, which was guided by progressive intellectuals such as Karl Marx. In Spain, the process of schooling to reduce illiteracy during the 20th century was a double-edged sword because, despite combating illiteracy, it encouraged political ignorance through school indoctrination, for example, during the Second Spanish Republic, children had to read works that were considered "antifascist" such as Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) or Fuente Ovejuna (De Vega, 1619). On the other hand, during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, children were indoctrinated making them sing a song of fascist ideology, which is Cara al Sol, also, during this dictatorship education was left to the Catholic Church, this led to the learning of religious values, which led to a remarkable conservative and religious ideology in Spanish society. Another cause of political ignorance, which is related to illiteracy is extreme nationalisms, a clear example of this was the Nazism of Germany originated by Adolf Hitler, who through demagogy and populist speeches got the German population of the 30s and early 40s to give their support. In this case, it is observed how appealing to patriotic feelings leads the voter into a political ignorance because it leaves aside logic and reason for their emotions. It should be noted that what happened in Germany resulted in hostility to nationalist extremism. From the second half of the 20th century to the present day, after the arrival of television in many houses, various politicians and leaders observed that this could be a tool for political purposes. In this case, we have an example of Spain where in the 1950s Francisco Franco used Televisión Española (RTVE) as a weapon to manipulate the vision of Spanish society, through the retransmission of events that manipulated reality in favour of the Franco regime. Another case was the denunciation by the British newspaper Financial Times against the government of Mariano Rajoy in 2015, who was accused of having programmed public television to favour his party and harm others before the Spanish elections in 2015. It should also be noted that nowadays, not only have we seen attempts at political propaganda in the news bulletins of public television channels, but it has been transferred to private television channels. The consequence of this method resulted in clear support for politicians who did this practice, as an example, Mariano Rajoy won the Spanish elections in 2015 or the massive propaganda that was made for those who were in favour of Brexit. Today, in order to reduce the effects of silent propaganda on television, political talk shows such as Al Rojo Vivo or Gato al agua were created in Spain. It is worth mentioning that this type of programmes are a double-edged sword, since although their objective of reducing political ignorance by exposing opposing ideas was courteous, in the end, these programmes ended up losing sight of their primary objective, due to the fact that Al Rojo Vivo began to favour left-wing ideologies while Gato al agua favoured right-wing ideologies. Now, I'm going to talk about the political instrument, which has emerged recently, but the most powerful of all time because of the magnitude of the people it has reached, nothing more and nothing less than social networks because through them we are interconnected with the whole world and more now with smartphones, but how could it generate political ignorance? Although social networks have the objective of connecting us they have done it, but now that objective has been distorted into a darker one, which is to benefit certain political parties through the manipulation of the information that is disseminated. An example of this is Donald Trump's false statements on Twitter, which according to the "Fact checker" of The Washington Post, Donald Trump has made more than 10,000 misleading assertions. Another misuse of social networks is the dissemination of viral videos edited through computer programs, called "deep fakes", which have the objective of attacking politically. Lastly, one of the worst social networking practices that have happened recently has been the case of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In this scandal, Cambridge Analytica (C.A.) collected personal information from 87 million people on Facebook. According to Brittany Kaiser, who is an employee of the company, stated that the main objective was "to find people in the states where it was not clear who was voting for" so that these undecided users would be put all kinds of political information in order to persuade them to vote for Donald Trump (Merco Press, 2019). Having reached this point, we have arguments to consider that social networks are a lethal weapon to generate political ignorance without us having realised, that is why we must act to combat this scourge of the 21st century. Finally, it can be observed that in the "beta" democracies of the 19th and early 20th-century political ignorance was terrible but remediable because it only needed to educate the population, but obviously, that process of education cost the exploitation, struggle and suffering of many people. Though despite the fact that today we enjoy having a universal education, we have been manipulated through this and the emergence of new technologies that were made to "increase our knowledge", but that in the end they were used to manipulate knowledge with the purpose of creating a silent indoctrination. For the new causes of current political ignorance, I suggest that in social networks there should be a verifier of affirmations in order to inform every reader a text or statement whether it is true or not. With this tool, the number of false assertions made by politicians will decrease dramatically, making social networks safer from fallacies that could affect the knowledge of every person. I highly recommend the creation of a supranational cybernetic organization that firmly regulates the activity of data collection companies. Regarding the scandal of Cambridge Analytica, we must not allow these companies to continue violating our privacy for political purposes. That is why we need an institution, which not only protects our privacy but also maintains our dignity to think freely. Concerning television and press, I propose that each country promote apolitical and non-partisan activities that encourage critical thinking in order to make society less manipulable. Also, with the aim of reducing our ignorance from watching the news bulletin, a political talk show or reading the newspaper, I suggest that every person should read and watch different programmes and newspaper from diverse ideologies in order to achieve more reasoning skills. I firmly believe the policies that I have presented in this essay are useful to fight the political ignorance because they not only protect ourselves from possible indoctrinations, but also these ideas have been designed to help the society to be more proactive and conscious. Written by Jimmy Crespo
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