The Faust Baseline™Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
micvicfaust@intelligent-people.org
I spent twenty-six years isolated at work from this shift, and I didn’t know it was happening until literally today .
Not because I wasn’t paying attention.
Because I assumed something foundational was still intact.
I assumed people were still being taught to read the way I was — by phonics, by structure, by building meaning piece by piece until language stuck. I assumed reading was still a skill people carried into adulthood, even if they didn’t love it.
That assumption was wrong.
And once you see it, a lot of things suddenly make sense.
People didn’t just “stop reading.”
They stopped being taught how to read in a way that forms thinking.
Whole-language learning replaced phonics in many schools decades ago. The idea sounded humane: immerse kids in language, let meaning emerge naturally, trust context over structure. In theory, it was about understanding, not drills.
In practice, something critical broke.
Without phonics as a foundation, many people learned to recognize words without learning how to decode them. They learned to guess from context. To skim. To infer just enough to get by. Reading became pattern recognition, not comprehension.
It worked — until it didn’t.
As long as text was short, predictable, and supported by images or explanation, things held together. But sustained reading? Argument that unfolds slowly? Language that doesn’t announce its conclusion up front?
That’s where people started to disappear.
And nobody really noticed, because the world adjusted around it.
Video stepped in.
Video doesn’t require decoding.
It doesn’t require holding structure in your head.
It doesn’t require assembling meaning internally.
Tone is supplied.
Emphasis is supplied.
Emotion is supplied.
Conclusion is supplied.
You don’t have to read.
You just have to watch.
That’s why everything gets filmed now.
Not because people love documenting life — but because video removes the burden of interpretation.
Reading asks something uncomfortable:
You participate. You hold the meaning. You are responsible for understanding.
Video lets you remain passive.
And that explains a lot of what we’re seeing everywhere now.
People will scroll text, but they hesitate to engage with it.
They read, but they don’t respond.
They absorb, but they don’t articulate.
It’s not apathy.
It’s insecurity.
When someone hasn’t practiced sustained reading in years, responding feels risky. Putting words back out feels like exposure. Silence feels safer than being wrong.
That’s not stupidity.
It’s a skill gap.
And here’s where my own experience finally clicked.
I spent decades operating as if everyone around me could still do this — follow a line of reasoning, sit with complexity, read without needing it spoon-fed. When people didn’t respond, I took it as disinterest, or indifference, or bad faith.
Now I see it differently.
Many people today can consume language, but they struggle to inhabit it.
They can take in information.
They can’t always live inside an argument.
That changes how everything lands — work, writing, trust, even conflict.
It also explains why so much public discourse has collapsed into slogans, clips, and outrage. Those formats don’t require literacy in the old sense. They reward reaction, not comprehension.
And it explains why tools built for thinking — not entertainment — feel heavy to people even when they resonate.
This isn’t a moral failure.
It’s a structural one.
A society that stops teaching people how to read deeply doesn’t just lose books. It loses patience, nuance, and internal authority. People become dependent on being told what things mean.
That’s dangerous — not because it makes people ignorant, but because it makes them dependent.
The quiet cost shows up later:
– difficulty making independent judgments
– fear of standing alone
– reluctance to commit to ideas that require explanation
– preference for watching over participating
Once you see that, a lot of modern behavior stops being mysterious.
People aren’t disengaged.
They’re out of practice.
And rebuilding that skill doesn’t happen through scolding or simplification. It happens slowly, through exposure to language that respects the reader enough to ask them to work again — without humiliating them for struggling.
That’s the work most systems won’t do.
Because it’s slow.
Because it doesn’t scale cleanly.
Because it doesn’t convert instantly.
But it matters.
Because reading isn’t about words.
It’s about agency of thought.
And when people lose that, they don’t just stop reading.
They stop trusting themselves to think out loud.
Once you understand that, the silence looks different.
Not empty.
Just waiting for a muscle to come back online.
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