What Happens When Contemporary Society Stops Thinking
Why the Decline of Deep Literacy Poisons Intelligent, Thoughtful Debate — And How We Can Reclaim It
Listen to the Deep-Dive Podcast.
In my article “The Silent Famine,” I argued that reading is far more than an academic skill but a gateway to Agency, voice, and identity, and it has far wider consequences. When we lose the will and capacity to read thoughtfully, we don’t just impoverish our minds — we destabilise the very foundations of democratic society.
Words Have Power — not just to express, but to shape what’s possible.
I don’t just teach literacy in my “Stories That Connect” workshop. I help participants rediscover that their words can define their reality, direction, and identity. Most people hear this phrase and move on. But once you’ve seen a young person speak with a voice, they didn’t know they had — once you’ve watched them move from silence to authorship — you’ll understand what those three words mean.
This article is inspired by Eric Levitz’s recent article in Vox. Levitz’s article is a powerful exploration of what he calls “digital orality” and supports my “Words Have Power” claim with striking philosophical depth.
Levitz draws on the work of Walter Ong and Maryanne Wolf to suggest that the decline of deep reading is reshaping our consciousness, pushing society back toward the habits of pre-literate oral cultures. In these cultures, memory is prized over logic, social context overrides abstract principles and thought is tethered to the immediate and the tribal.
“In Ong’s account, the advent of writing radically restructured thought… Literacy facilitated modes of thought that were more independent, rational, individualistic, and universalistic than those of oral societies.”
Levitz writes that we are entering a second oral age, but this time, instead of bards and storytellers, our minds are shaped by swipeable content, algorithmic feeds, and the never-ending now. He quotes Katherine Dee:
“On the internet, information doesn’t stick when it’s stored; it sticks when it circulates”, which is a profound inversion of literacy’s original promise: instead of building inner coherence through slow accumulation, today’s minds are trained to respond to stimulus, not structure, and erosion, Levitz argues, is not benign. It weakens our ability to think abstractly, to hold multiple perspectives, and to apply reason to unfamiliar situations.
The decline in reading isn’t a sudden collapse — it’s a quiet unravelling. Most people don’t decide to stop thinking. They gradually slip into modes of consumption that no longer require it. Digital platforms aren’t yet recognised as drugs, but function like drugs by rewarding speed, novelty, and social alignment.
We often forget that humanity’s most transformative eras—Athens in the time of Socrates, Rome at its intellectual zenith, and the Enlightenment salons of Europe—were not just marked by wealth or conquest but by reverence for thought. These were ages when thinking was considered the highest form of human expression—when civic life depended on the quality of public discourse and the training of the mind.
Today, that reverence is slipping away. Digital platforms steal our attention, but more insidiously, they erode our appetite for depth. We are trading the rich interiority of reflective life for the dopamine flicker of instant stimuli.
If there is a civilisational warning to heed, it is this: when we stop thinking, we stop being fully human. The essence of who we are — our ability to reason, discern, empathise, and imagine — begins to fade.
Peer dynamics reinforce shallowness as a norm, and over time, the mind adapts — skimming replaces attention, reaction replaces reflection, and we begin to confuse the intake of content with the practice of thought.
Over time, the mind adapts, just as it would to a drug. The shallower the stimuli, the less mental effort. Skimming feels efficient. Scrolling feels endless. The brain, always hungry for shortcuts, rewires itself for speed over synthesis. In this sense, the move away from deep literacy isn’t just neglect — it becomes a kind of addiction to frictionless thought, cognitive passivity, and never being forced to sit in uncertainty or nuance.
Escaping that state isn’t just a matter of choice. It requires withdrawal from overstimulation and a return to discomfort. Thinking deeply is work, but it is the kind of work that builds Agency. And when we reawaken that muscle through sustained reading, reflective dialogue, and authorship, we begin to remember what it feels like to be a thinking, feeling human.
We are living through a cultural hallucination: the belief that if something isn’t digital, it must be obsolete. The glow of a screen now carries more authority than the quiet precision of a printed page. Technological advancement has disrupted industries and displaced the idea that human insight, contemplation, or moral clarity might still matter. Many believe the algorithm sees more clearly than Socrates, and the latest AI is wiser than any ancient thinker.
This is not progress. It’s amnesia.
When society equates newer with truer, we sever ourselves from the lineage of wisdom. We mistake the interface for substance. Worst of all, we train the next generation to believe that cultural evolution is unnecessary — that the machine will do our thinking and that history is a distraction from the now. But when we lose our respect for the deep human work of reflection and meaning-making, we don’t just fail to advance — we regress. We become programmable, not sovereign.
As William Blake once wrote, “All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you.” Reading is not just about understanding the world outside — it is a way of traversing the vast terrains within. When we lose the ability or the will to read deeply, we abandon our own internal landscapes. We outsource wonder. We numb inquiry. And we forget that the richest dramas of human life unfold not on screens, but in the silent theatre of the mind.
Once the skimming mindset takes hold, rediscovering the joy of deep reading and real thinking isn’t a casual return — it’s a recovery process. Like weaning off an addictive stimulant, it can be disorienting, even painful at first. But that discomfort signals something more profound: that our most important muscle — the mind — is waking up after long neglect. And with it, our Agency.
Levitz’s perspective aligns directly with the crisis I described in classrooms: year ten students like Layla fear reading aloud, not because they’re unintelligent, but because their world has not trained them to value sustained thought. As Levitz puts it:
“Our thinking is becoming less abstract and more narrowly practical; less rational and emotive; less universalistic and more tribal.”
That shift doesn’t just impact education — it poisons politics.
Levitz suggests that deep literacy was one of the cognitive pillars of liberal democracy. When reading wanes, so does the public’s tolerance for ambiguity, reasoned disagreement, and evidence that requires more than a glance to comprehend.
“Populism of the illiberal nationalist kind,” historian Adam Garfinkle argues, “happens in a mass-electoral democracy when a decisive percentage of mobilised voters drops below a deep-literacy standard.”
While The Silent Famine focuses on students and schools, Levitz helps us see the civilisational stakes of the problem. When reading fades, discernment fades with it. And when discernment vanishes, we become vulnerable to demagogues, conspiracy theories, algorithmic manipulation, and, worst of all, the illusion that our opinions are the truth.
Levitz is not simply nostalgic. He is clear-eyed about the limits of writerly moralism. He acknowledges that literacy alone does not make us just and that intellectuals have often used language to obscure truth as much as to reveal it.
But Levitz’s argument ultimately circles back to what my Stories That Connect workshop is built upon: that deep reading doesn’t just teach content — it cultivates the inner architecture of abstract thought, empathy, and discernment that makes Agency possible. My idea is that reading profoundly shapes us inwardly. It builds abstraction, empathy, logic, and a quiet space within the mind where thinking can begin.
This is why I created the Stories That Connect workshop, which helps participants, whether fifteen or fifty, rediscover their capacity for meaningful reading and authorship. Unlike traditional literacy interventions, the workshop doesn’t begin with mechanics. It begins with stories — lived, shared, and co-created.
Participants work in small groups to craft and perform short stories drawn from their experiences. In doing so, they are reintroduced to language not as a hurdle to overcome but as a medium for identity, understanding, and connection. The goal is not to produce perfect grammar or flawless prose but to reignite a personal relationship with reading as thinking.
This workshop has helped teenagers move from self-doubt to self-expression. But it has also helped adults rediscover the cognitive satisfaction of structuring a story, engaging with nuance, and communicating meaning. We’re all continually directed toward noise and speed, which is why “Stories That Connect” invites us back to coherence, presence, and purpose, and rebuilds self-confidence.
That’s what I’m trying to restore — one story at a time.
About the Author: Greg Twemlow
Founder of Fusion Bridge, a global initiative building AI-enabled frameworks for leadership, learning, and ethical innovation. I write at the collision points of technology, education, and human agency. Here are my Five Writing Magnets:
- Re-imagining Education for an AI Epoch — School is frozen in chalk while GenAI rewrites the rules.
- Creativity as the Last Human Advantage — If machines mimic craft, only authentic creation protects relevance.
- Personal Epiphany & Resilience Stories — Crisis moments become design fuel instead of defeat.
- Ethical AI & Next-Gen Leadership — Power without principle erodes trust faster than any technology.
- Societal Wake-Up Calls — Complacency about climate, data, or democracy has a ticking cost.
Contact: greg@fusionbridge.org — Explore gregtwemlow.medium.com
