Ignorance In Gore's The Assault On Reason

Gore’s The Assault on Reason, is Gore’s way of telling America to open their eyes and not be so gullible to the politicians’ games. Throughout the book he relates the problems with America now, to how the founders would have liked it, or tried to preserve our democracy. He never refers to our democracy as dead, but rather ill. There is a growing ignorance and neglect for political facts among the voting public, and many politicians are considering the voter’s consent something with monetary value, something that can be bought or sold. Factors such as reason, logic, and facts used to play a crucial role in the national conversation, but now it is as if it is myth. An example of the growing ignorance that Gore uses in his book even caught me

by surprise. He says that, “70% of Americans believed that the person personally responsible for the attacks on 9/11was Saddam Hussein, and 50% of Americans still believe this today.” I am not going to lie, before reading this book I was a part of that 50%.

Political elites have a way of altering the media, and using the media as a weapon to get what they want, and most Americans are too ignorant to stop and analyze what’s going on and see the facts. The biggest vehicle that politicians use is the television, which is where Gore starts his book. Gore does an excellent job of selling television as a top contributor to the assault on reason, and this is because, unlike the newspaper or internet, television is a medium for the rich and powerful, because not just anyone can get on TV. Also, unlike the internet, television is a means in which elite politicians overload viewers with information passively, which means that people cannot have a two-way conversation, because to purchase airtime on television costs a pretty penny, and only the rich and powerful (political elites) have the money to get that kind of airtime. This is a

direct example of the assault on reason, because on television when you’re not watching your show, game, or whatever, you are probably watching commercials, which is all advertising. Advertising, as Gore explains, directly plays into the assault on reason, because the whole system is set up off of effective means of manipulation, rather than reason and evidence which Gore calls “the manufacture of consent”. This means of manipulation has gone from commercial uses to politics now, where images on commercials trigger emotional responses rather than reasonable responses, and the biggest emotional response of them all is fear. The best example I can think of this would be the majority of political campaign commercials. In those commercials, there are images of broken houses and poor families, and then after some political elite comes into the picture everyone is smiling, and things look nicer, and there is just so much manipulation on the commercials that reason and logic have been thrown out the window.
The following chapters elaborate on multiple problems with the Bush administration, but focuses on the secretive nature of the administration that excluded a lot of information from the general public that would have been helpful in making reasonable decisions, but rather the Bush administration disregarded evidence and expertise, especially when it did not agree with the decisions that the administration had already decided on.

One of the main examples described in the book was the authorization of torture and the attempts by the administration to create legal disarray involving the treatment of prisoners. This lead to Bush thinking he had the right to seize and imprison American citizens without trial, attack any country he saw as a threat, to wiretap people’s phones without them knowing to see if someone was planning any terrorist attacks, as well as searching people’s private property without warrants. The biggest surprise that I read were the reasons why Bush actually wanted to go to war with Iraq, but used Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks as a vehicle to install fear into the American people, and trigger an emotional response from the general public thus making it easier for the Bush administration to pull the wool over our eyes and throw out all reasons and logic, thus getting the laws he wanted passed. Through this fear installed by the Bush administration, President Bush was able to sell the war and have religious extremists approve new federal judges. These new

judges passed new laws all according to Bush’s agenda. The Bush Administration even went so far as to break away from international treaties thus losing a lot of respect internationally, digging America into a bigger whole then it was already getting into. Overall, I feel that the main focus of the book, and the conclusion that I believe Gore wanted his audience to get to, was just simply to not be so ignorant and blind to the tricks of politicians, and to think more with reason and logic instead of falling for the propaganda that political elites express to the general public, through lies, deception, and television, which are all examples of the assault on reason. Gore did an amazing job laying out plenty of examples that expressed how there is corruption and trickery taking place with politicians and how the general public is so easily susceptible to that trickery.
Surprisingly I found this book to be quite interesting, I am not into politics, nor reading about it; but this book wasn’t necessarily about politics but more rather the problems with government and corruption that took place during the Bush Administration. I found Gore’s examples to be very powerful and moving, but of course that is how it is meant to be perceived. It is hard for me to really take anything away from this book because I knew prior to reading it, how corrupt and scandalous politicians can be, so a lot of the ideas that Gore presented throughout the book was nothing novel to me. However, his examples that portrayed the corruption and wrong-doings in government really captured my attention, and made it hard for me to stop reading. I do not feel that my views of government are any different after reading this book because it only further reassured the thoughts I have about government and politicians. And who’s to say that if Bush were telling the story, it would be completely different, so of course there are two sides to every story, but I really enjoyed the way Gore told his side with his powerful examples and relatable topics, making this an intriguing and exciting read.