In this 'information age', we have access to vast amounts of information, but the quality of what we have access to is increasingly questionable. Real news reporting is buried under a landslide of prepackaged news planted by corporate PR, ideological groups, government and other entities interested in manipulating how we act and consume. Real news is buried from one side by a river of PR and from the other side by pressure from the dominant media conglomerates to select news for its entertainment value.

Our sources of belief have become less trustworthy. Once they were mainly our parents, elders, teachers, neighbors, and other people we grew up with and spent time with personally. Those sources were sometimes right and sometimes sadly wrong, but at least they didn't systematically exploit or deceive us by the millions, for purposes unrelated to our own well-being.

We're stressed out by unprecedented levels of environmental and social destabilization: 500-year floods, devastating hurricanes, increasingly severe water shortages, unexpected crop failures, resurgent diseases and war. Often the reaction to such stress is to flee - not just physically, but emotionally and cognitively. People who have money often flee from the pain of their lives by consuming.

Our world has been turned inside-out by entertainment. Once it was built around work, now it's made up of thrills. In industrial countries, entertainment has become the kind of dominant business that manufacturing once was. The loci of our entertainments are artificial environments - stadiums and auditoriums and the interiors of cars, instead of canyons and vales and dells; earphones instead of the sounds of birds or wind; and the false fictions of TV ads and sitcoms instead of reality. If we're not astonished by the gradual extinction of our world, maybe it's in part because, being constantly cut off from it, we no longer have any strong expectations to begin with.

The disconnection is worsened by systemic misuses of technology. Consider, for example, the soaring dissemination of automated toys and games that provide the propulsion, conflict or imagery once provided by children's arms, legs and imaginations. In a Toys-R-Us world, we spend more and more to bring up kids who are less and less connected to what keeps them alive.

What to do? Good policy is not enough. It does for human behavior what end-of-pipe control does for pollution. So, just as pollution is more effectively attacked at the source, attitudes need attacking at their sources - in the education of kids by parents and schools, in the learning environment we grow up in, in the curricula of universities, in the accountability of media. We need to revisit how people learn (or don't learn) from the first gasp of life to the last, because today's average upper-middle class college grad, when you strip away what he knows about entertainment and technology, has a medieval understanding of the world. That understanding won't get us through the next century.

With thanks to.....