In the days of old, paper was a scarce commodity because of the amount of sheer effort that went into producing it.
Back then, if you had access to paper, it was because you had something worth writing about. And because you didn’t want to waste paper, you had to give sufficient thought to whatever you were going to write.
This is one big reason a lot of classic books are very dense in meaning - paper was hard to come by and only the highest quality ideas and thoughts were ever transcribed. (If you are a Christian, this will make you appreciate the Bible more)
To be educated meant two things: (1) You could give considerable thought to your ideas before condensing them to words written on scarce paper. (2) You could also unpack the meanings in the dense words and expound upon these meanings in a way that the common man could grasp.
In fact, the root word for educate is the Latin word “educere” which describes the process of drawing one thing out of another. In other words, if you were not skilled at extracting actionable meaning from condensed words, you were not educated.
Today, the story is very different.
The abundance of paper, and later word processors, and now the internet, means that though more people can read and write, fewer and fewer people are educated in the original sense of the word. That explains why there is an abundance of low-quality information, ideas and books out there - particularly in the past 20 - 30 years.
The world is filled with mindless readers and writers who live like programmed robots executing the same poorly-written line of code. Very few people are giving considerable time to their thoughts before they dispense them into cyberspace. In any case, even fewer people are willing to use their heads for more than a hat rack. The vast majority of people are only interested in viral tweets and the latest scandal in town.
Understand this: There is a whole realm of possibilities available to the ones who choose to break away from conformity to mediocrity and become educated. These are the people who understand that we’re in a battle of words, and only the ones who have a mastery of words will win.