I always get a kick out of old-school science fiction movies and television shows, particularly the schlock that was produced in the 1950’s.

I love that people living in the undefined future will have a strange attraction to space age leisure suits, never engage in manual labor or clean up after themselves, eat multi-colored food, and somehow manage to build absurd space weaponry and towering cities without either taxes or toilets. I especially enjoy the console lights that blink dramatically whenever a computer is thinking and the wide variety of robots that probably have to spend more time scrubbing floors than we are ever led to believe yet always seem pristine and functional—despite the obvious realities of problematic maintenance, unreliable batteries, and glitchy software.

This mythical future, which features regular encounters with hostile aliens and confused leaders (much like our mundane present), typically has a peculiar lack of varicose veins, wrinkles, an arthritis, and somehow the crises always manage to neatly resolve themselves thanks to human pluck and ingenuity.

However, our foolish hopes for a bright (or at least tolerable) future have been a real annoyance to those who need us to be perpetually terrified of what lies ahead. I suppose this is why science fiction has, along with a lot of our other popular entertainment, taken a more forbidding and foreboding turn over the past couple of decades. Optimism is a real drag for those who want to rob us and control us.

The extinctionists are always hard at work because fear forces compliance—and frees up funding. Ever since the dawn of the atomic age, predicting our demise has been the lifeblood of America’s defeatists. During the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, a variety of treasonous spies and saps made buck by avidly working to undermine our nation. When the U.S.S.R. fell, the next big threat became climate change, which led to the creation of innumerable nanny-state careers and allowed happy Leftists to dictate what we can drive, where we can live, and what we can eat; however, the earth is greener, the ice caps are not melting, the coral reefs are doing fine, and storms are demonstrably no worse than they were in the past, so this one is turning into a bust. Covid-19, of course, had a short and disastrous run as the next horseman of the apocalypse, and it must be profoundly disappointing to the jab-happy maskers to see Dr. Fauci, their hero and savior, now taking the 5th and refusing to answer questions in front of a Senate investigative committee.

So what is a committed fear monger to do today?

The next big panic seems to be Artificial Intelligence, which is apparently going to physically enslave humanity. Although it could be possible that our robots will rebel against us—a problem readily solved with a couple of rounds of buckshot—the more significant issue, in my opinion, is that our abilities to think and express ourselves will atrophy. Artificial Intelligence is already crushing our writing and reading skills, and much of what we do read today comes to us courtesy of bots that excise nuance, skirt complexity, shortchange evaluation, and ignore discussion. If we willingly transform ourselves into a nation of slack-jawed and illiterate idiots, Artificial Intelligence—and the tech executives and bureaucrats who control it—will not need to work very hard to dominate us.

Sadly, my solution to the threat of Artificial Intelligence will likely bring me neither riches nor power: Pick up a book and read for an hour every day. The plain fact is that literacy has inherently limited profit potential because so much great fiction and non-fiction—all of which was written by an actual human being and not an AI app—is out of copyright and available free of charge online through either a variety of not-for-profit websites or your local library system.

A classic book or play cannot today be readily monetized, so few are ranting about the need to read Jane Austen, George Orwell, or Shakespeare—but read we must. Educated citizens who can think for themselves are more difficult to manipulate, particularly because the wisdom of the past inevitably exposes the foolishness of the present. The glory and blindness of human nature has not changed a smidge, and we have been struggling with the same questions about duty, freedom, and justice since the dawn of civilization. As much as some might want to convince us that history is a worthless litany of evils, understanding the past teaches us the difficult truth that we are often our own worst enemies because we are easily frightened and confused. Moreover, we will always ruin our lives and the lives of those around us if we allow ourselves to wallow in the shortsightedness produced by ignorance.

Unfortunately, if you look at our public schools today, literacy is being stripped from the curriculum at an astonishing pace. Engaging as a class with challenging novels and plays—by actually reading the entire work and discussing it—is being ditched for disconnected excerpts to accommodate the attenuated attention spans of the TikTok generation, which lacks reading stamina and the requisite higher-order vocabulary. Long-form writing and research is being replaced by monitored in-class writing only—mostly because of the fear of AI doing the work for the student—so thinking terminates at the bell, and the revision process, which is critical to student improvement, is shelved altogether. These deficiencies trickle up to our college campuses, which are today desperately fighting to fill their seats and not annoy students who find reading and writing a real drag because they never developed either the skills or the motivation necessary for true college readiness—and later life and career success.

Reading can be difficult. However, like every other endeavor, practice and diligent effort improve skill and enjoyment, so open a book today and give your brain a spin.

Trust me. It is wonderful.