Pip: Philosophyofgoodnews has been busy — reading, writing, preparing a book, and apparently discovering that the cure for all of it is the sea.

Mara: That’s actually the starting point for today’s episode. We’re looking at how information overload erodes the capacity for independent thought, and what it might take to reclaim it.

Pip: Let’s start with the essay that puts a name to the whole mechanism.

The Science of Maintaining Ignorance

Pip: The central claim here is that ignorance isn’t accidental — it’s engineered. The question the essay is really asking is: how did a system designed to work against us get so many of us to voluntarily carry it forward?

Mara: The essay traces it to an overdose of noise rather than a shortage of information. The setup is a personal one — a month of overwork leading to a forced pause — and out of that pause comes this: “The aim is not to allow humans to think by their own brains.”

Pip: That’s the mechanism named plainly. The flood of news isn’t a side effect of a busy media landscape — it’s the point. Keep the feed moving fast enough and nobody stops to look at what the essay calls the strategic details, the small things that actually define long-term processes.

Mara: And those details, the essay argues, are hiding in plain sight. The problem isn’t that they’re concealed — it’s that we’ve been conditioned to scroll past them. Propaganda overload is described as “the basic lever of government,” one that has, in the essay’s words, attacked our consciousness and transformed us.

Pip: Transformed us toward what, exactly? The essay gets specific: we allied with the education system expecting diplomas to make us important, and in doing so handed over the very tool — independent judgment — that might have protected us.

Mara: There’s a quote from a philosophy professor that sharpens this into something almost unbearable: “HUMANS HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO CRY. THE PAIN DID NOT DISAPPEAR. THE POWER OF LAMENT DISAPPEARED.”

Pip: The loss of lament as a diagnostic. That’s not a small observation.

Mara: The essay doesn’t leave it there. The prescription is deliberately modest — measure your words, let them mature before speaking, understand others’ suffering. The argument is that reclaiming the soul starts at that scale, not at the systemic level.

Pip: Small moves against a large machine. Which raises the question of whether the machine notices.

Mara: The essay seems to think it will — eventually. The closing is a direct address to those running the propaganda: “We will regain faith and befriend with our own soul, showing you how the universe works.”

---

Mara: The thread running through all of this is attention — what we do with it, who profits when we surrender it.

Pip: And whether a walk to the sea still counts as resistance. More from philosophyofgoodnews next time.

Darko Richard Lancelot

June 10, 2026

Connect and Respect