Social media would hamstring any mobilisation today

Thank you Bruce Bisset ( HB Today, November 23), for encapsulating in a single opening paragraph the nub of the problem the world faces today.

An unlikely conspiracy theory is perhaps the only credible way of explaining the current impending train wreck facing the world.

Educationists have been saying for years that, with the information revolution, teaching has to change, as if everything hitherto was learnt by rote. It wasn’t.

What education did, and still needs to do, is teach people how to make a reasoned argument (as opposed to show people how to be digitally savvy, or remember spurious facts).

Would, for instance, Hitler have capitulated at Munich in 1939 if Chamberlain, considering the Czech’s substantial military, had not appeased him?

This is something which information technology can’t answer. If 1939 was today, however, the power of surveillance the Gestapo would have would be hugely enhanced. Likewise, the opportunity for Churchill to mobilise a nation would be greatly reduced — every nay-sayer nut-head would have their own grandstand.

The predicament is even more urgent than in 1939, but instead of a Churchill we get a Trump. Or, as Bruce Bisset says, “disparate communities of fear driven by denial of fact (are) rendering us incapable of reason.” Chris Wilson

Wairoa