I think it’s safe to say that, in most cases, garbage in, garbage out, is a reasonable assumption. You already live by this at the grocery store. A cart full of boxes does not turn into a strong body because you ate often and felt busy doing it. Then the same people turn around and tell you that reading is good. No caveats. Nobody is allowed to ask what the literature actually is. Quantity is the whole virtue. Finish more of them. Post the stack. The book itself is a detail.
This habit of prioritizing quantity over quality mirrors the rest of the modern world. More steps, more content, more books, and the question of whether any of it was food is treated as rude. Reading is like eating. You are what you eat. Unfortunately the Standard American Diet, aptly named SAD, is a mirror of standard reading habits, and leads to the same results. Unhealthy adults, unhealthy minds. A body that is tired and still hungry, and a mind in the same condition, already reaching for the next bowl because the last one didn’t hold.
Romance novels, true-crime novels, fantasy novels, victimhood posing as self-help, body positivity, all of it being read by adults. These are the Captain Crunch and Fruit Loops of the literary world. Sweet, easy, made to be finished, and engineered so that finishing one makes you want another. A child food, eaten by grown people, by the bowl, and then defended as a personality. You can live on it. A lot of adults do. They are then surprised to find themselves foggy, touchy, and very sure about things they have never actually chewed.
And here is the part that gets lied about. The good food is not a secret, and it is not going uneaten. Thomas Sowell has sold a pile of books. Jordan Peterson has sold a pile of books. People read them. The same way some people eat real food. Keto is growing. Carnivore is growing. The official food pyramid, the one that put the bread at the bottom and called it health, is losing customers, and the customers walking out are not a random sample of the country. It is mostly conservatives. The people who will throw out the cereal are, by and large, the same people who will sit still for Sowell telling them there are no solutions, only trade-offs, and for Peterson telling them to set their own house in order before they start correcting the world. That is a meal. It sells. It just sells to the people who were already willing to chew.
Liberals are the ones on the pablum. I use that word on purpose. Pablum is baby cereal. Mush. Pre-chewed, so nobody has to work a jaw. Socialist tropes. Oppression dogma. Victimhood, bound up as if it were a moral achievement to stay injured. That is the reading diet, and they believe it. The system is rigged, the country is a crime, you are what was done to you, and anyone who hands you a trade-off is the enemy. It goes down without chewing. It is sweet. It tells you that you were right. And it is what they push on kids in the public schools, because they rule them.
Not “influence.” Rule. The unions, the education colleges, the people who pick the books and write the worksheets. The child does not get a bookstore. The child gets a tray. This is the metaphor all the way down, and it is not subtle. The same building that serves the school lunch, the institutional version of SAD, puts the institutional book on the desk. Soft history in which America is the villain and the child is invited to pick an oppressed team. Stories whose whole lesson is that fairness means someone owes you. Feelings exercises dressed up as reading. You do not hand that kid Sowell. Sowell would ruin the tray. A ten-year-old who learns trade-offs is harder to feed slogans to at sixteen. So the slogans come first, while the jaw is still soft, and by the time the kid can walk into a library the pablum is what food tastes like.
The conservatives reading Peterson and buying steak are not a mystery, and they are not a majority of the curriculum. They opted out of the cafeteria. Everyone else is still being told that reading is good, the way the food pyramid said grains are good, and the result is the same shape of person. Sluggish, sure of the wrong things, and angry at anyone who mentions the ingredient list. You are what you eat. A country that feeds its children baby cereal and calls it school will get adults who cannot chew, and then those adults will call the inability kindness.