TRUTH TO POWER This section presents a blueprint for what you can do personally to hasten the solution to the climate crisis. As you may have noticed… - Al Gore

عندما اكتسب البشر تدريجياً مستوى أعلى من التفكير ,فإننا اكتسبنا ميزة القدرة على توقع التهديدات الناشئة ,واكتسبنا القدرة على تصور التهديدات بدلاً من إدراكها فقط .لكننا أيضاً اكتسبنا القدرة على تصور التهديدات (المتخيلة). وعندما تقتنع مجموعة من الناس بتصور هذه التهديدات (المتخيلة ),يمكنهم تنشيط استجابة الخوف لتصير بقوة الاستجابة نفسها للتهديدات الحقيقة .

In a time of social fragmentation, vulgarity becomes a way of life. To be shocking becomes more important - and often more profitable - than to be civil or creative or truly original.

In the early days of America’s democracy, education and literacy were the prerequisites for establishing a connection to the body politic. In a world where communication was dominated by the printed word, those who learned to read also learned to write. Gaining the ability to receive ideas was automatically accompanied by the ability to send ideas, expressing your own thoughts in the same medium through which you took in the thoughts of others. The connection, once established, was two-way. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The art of printing secures us against the retrogradation of reason and information.” In practice, the use of the printing press was mainly by the elites in America’s early decades, and the scurrilous, vitriolic attacks of that age certainly rivaled the worst of any modern political attacks. Nevertheless, the easy accessibility to the printed word opened up avenues of participation in the dialogue of democracy for people like Thomas Paine, who had neither family wealth nor political influence — other than what he gained with the eloquence of his writing. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television — a distracting and absorbing medium that seems determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates. If the information and opinions made available in the marketplace of ideas come only from those with enough money to pay a steep price of admission, then all of those citizens whose opinions cannot be expressed in a meaningful way are in danger of learning that they are powerless as citizens and have no influence over the course of events in our democracy — and that their only appropriate posture is detachment, frustration, or anger.